


From Fire Unto Fire

by Anonymous



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-23
Updated: 2020-09-23
Packaged: 2021-03-07 16:22:01
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 36,171
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26610607
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: The apocalypse has been averted. Lucifer and Michael are securely locked in the Cage, but peace has come at too high a price. Choosing to leave Heaven, Castiel resumes his relationship with a directionless and suicidal Dean Winchester. Hellbent on rescuing his brothers, Dean - with Castiel's help - begins using clues left in John Winchester's journal. Their goal: find a way into Hell. After a series of dead ends, they are approached by a mysterious woman, whose offer of assistance leads them to New Orleans, and the home of an ancient witch. Her power to open doorways allows Dean and Castiel to slip into Hell undetected, where they embark on a journey that will unknowingly earn their place as a footnote in a much older mythology.
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester
Kudos: 11
Collections: Anonymous





	From Fire Unto Fire

**Author's Note:**

> Repost of a fic from DCBB 2013.

[Art Masterpost](http://casamancy.livejournal.com/1372.html)

The apocalypse came and went with little ceremony, too much regret, and broken promises. It’s three weeks out when Cas finds him. Dean’s standing in the middle of a gravel crossroads, screaming at the Heavens after a night spent drinking a fifth of Black Label. The bottle shatters against the ground in a spray of glittering glass, and Dean drops to his knees and begins to dig furiously at the earth. It’s a familiar ritual now, Dean going through the motions as easily as if he were cleaning his gun, or packing salt rounds.

The blow to his jaw takes him by surprise, and Dean stumbles backwards in a cloud of dust and disturbed gravel before he finds himself hoisted to his feet, 175 pounds of pissed off angel ready to pummel him. Dean raises a defensive hand, some sense of self preservation still overriding his desire to simply let this beating happen. He gasps out the name, ‘Cas,’ as the angel presses two fingers to his brow and he slips into darkness.

Dean wakes sometime later, unceremoniously draped across the double bed of some roadside motel. His entire body is throbbing with a pain he cannot place; his mouth feels like cotton and he can taste the lingering staleness of Scotch on his tongue. Hell of a night, huh? He cracks open an eye and hopes that he doesn’t find some half naked waitress passed out beside him, because that would be awkward and he’s in no mood for company.

Cas moves into his line of vision wearing a look that Dean would describe as incredibly pissed.

Dean hisses and shields his eyes as Cas ruthlessly turns on the bedside lamp, flooding the room with a warm glow that’s entirely too bright for Dean’s still drunk ass.

‘Come on, man. Don’t do that.’

Really, Cas could have at least mojoed away this queasy feeling. Dean lifts a hand to his jaw, winces at the tenderness, and suddenly remembers. Oh, shit.

‘It’s not what it looked like. I wasn’t going to deal,’ Dean admits. His head’s pounding and his hands are raw from the gravel. His lip is busted from where Cas clocked him out there on the road, and he just wants to sleep for the next week and then maybe wake up and find that this is nothing but a nightmare. A very long, very vivid, very real nightmare.

What a miserable sight Dean must be, and on top of all that, here is Cas, the angel who pulled him out of Hell the last time he’d gone and sold his soul, staring at Dean with those eyes like Castiel is so, so disappointed in him. And Dean just can’t take it.

‘Forgive my doubting, but that’s exactly what it looked like.’

Cas is angry, he has every right to be. It’s like that night in the alley, the night when Dean had given up, had decided to roll over and let that sanctimonious bastard Michael get what he wanted.

‘Look, I just wanted to talk.’ Dean squints, shields his eyes again. ‘Cas, can you turn that off? Feel like I’m being interrogated.’

The look that Cas gives him makes Dean consider for a minute that Cas is going to simply hurl the lamp off the nightstand, maybe take another shot at him, and he braces himself for the inevitable torrent of angelic fury. Hell, he probably deserves it anyway.

What he isn’t expecting is for Cas to lay a deceptively gentle hand against his cheek. Dean gasps at the sudden surge of energy shooting through his skull, and he thinks for one crazed moment that maybe this is it. Cas is tired of his bullshit and has decided to finally put him out of his misery, and he’s not sure if that’s a mercy or not. It’s over as quickly as it began.

Dean feels his face, finds his lip’s still busted but his massive headache is gone, his mind wiped of every substance that might impair his judgment. Cas is a real saint there. The least he could have done is take away the physical pain as well, but Dean suspects that Cas wants him to hurt, to remember why his jaw is bruised, his lip swollen. Now he doesn’t even have the lingering alcohol to numb the pain.

‘Why are you here, anyway? Thought you flew back upstairs.’ Dean tries not to sound as bitter as he feels, but the feathery son of a bitch just left him without even a goodbye.

The apocalypse had made desperate men of them both toward the end. Desperate enough to take their frustration and anger and sorrow out on one another, with beatings, and curses, and kisses, and heat slicked bodies thrusting and grinding, all hands and teeth and wet mouths that could make the other come hard and fast.

It had meant nothing. Nothing, Dean had told himself when he’d first given Cas a handjob the night before he met with Raphael. Taking one for the team after good ol’ Cas had struck out with the hooker. But nothing had very quickly turned into something, something that had found Dean on his back moaning and gasping and shattering with each thrust of Cas’ cock as he was fucked into the backseat of his own car.

And it had all escalated far too quickly with the world ending, Dean finding something he had never had with another being in those final days, and then the apocalypse didn’t happen, the world was saved, and Cas flew back to Heaven. And no, he’s not going to let on how bitter he is.

‘I came because you called me.’

And did he? Dean doesn’t remember that. Doesn’t remember a lot of what happened earlier that night. Remembers drinking, remembers screaming at God, challenging the bastard to smite his ass if He was actually there.

‘Huh ...’

‘You planned to summon a crossroads demon.’

Dean can’t deny that. He also can’t deny that if it had been willing to deal that he would have been tempted, and he feels sick with it, knowing that he’d go back there again. Of all the stupid fucked up things. He’s the one who started this shit. If Dean had only been able to let Sammy go, then his brother would be in Heaven.

Dean squeezes his eyes shut, tries to ignore the way his throat seizes.

‘I just wanted to talk to it,’ he repeats again.

‘You’re compromised by your grief.’

And yeah, there’s that.

The bedside lamp flies across the room, plug and all ripped from the wall, leaving them shrouded in darkness. It takes a few moments of nothing but the sound of Dean’s own ragged breaths for him to realize that he was the one to do it. To lash out in blind anger because it’s all he has left.

‘I can’t do it, Cas.’ His loss is tearing a hole inside him. Dean leans forward, buries his face between his hands and focuses on breathing because it’s all he can do to keep it together here. ‘Only thing keeping me from checking out is that Sam’s down in that place.’

Because Dean has thought of it more than just in passing, stared at his gun long and hard, hefted its weight and thought of how it would be to finally just let go. But he can’t, not if there’s even a chance that he can get Sam out of Hell. He’s got unfinished business, and then, when that’s done, sure, he’ll put a round into his skull.

‘This is what you do with Sam’s memory?’

When Dean looks up again, Castiel’s eyes are furious.

‘You left me! You went back to Heaven, didn’t give a fucking damn about me. You don’t get a free pass here, Cas. You don’t put this on someone and then leave when it’s over and done with. You’re just like the rest. Using Earth’s mud monkeys to do the dirty work. You know what, fuck you.’

The words slide off Dean's lips before he knows what he’s done, and now that they’re out there in the open, there’s no taking them back. He’s shaking with righteous fury because he let Sam sacrifice himself for these dickbags and their goddamn apocalypse. They should have let it all burn. Let Lucifer take his war to Heaven, kill the whole fucking lot of them.

For a moment Cas looks like he might fly away, his face utterly stunned in the wake of this outburst. Dean waits for the sound of wings.

‘You never asked me to stay.’

That, Dean wasn’t expecting. It’s like a knife to his gut, and there’s something so maddening in its simplicity that Dean lashes out, instinctively strikes back, like a cornered animal, feral and desperate. His balled up fist hits solid angel and -

‘Goddammit, Cas.’

Dean is stunned and hurting and he wasn’t expecting the bastard to just twist the knife into him again, and again, and again. Because Dean has never been able to give that part of himself, never been able to ask that of anyone, because there was nothing worth staying for.

Dean holds his busted hand against his chest, tries to will away the well of tears in his eyes. If he didn’t look pathetic before, he knows he must be a complete sight now. Heaven’s Righteous Man, reduced to a broken mess, ready to grovel at an angel’s feet to make this all just fucking stop.

‘What is it that you want?’ Cas asks. ‘If I recall, you asked for freedom. This is is. Free will. That was your choice.’

It wasn’t supposed to go this way. They were supposed to save six billion people from the horrors of the apocalypse.

‘I have to save him, Cas. I have to.’

‘Sam is my friend as well, Dean. You must know that I would have done anything for him to not be there in the Cage.’

‘Then help me … help me, you son of a bitch.’ It’s one of the hardest things Dean has ever asked for, admitting that he can’t do this alone. ‘Stay with me, just help me do this.’

And Cas finds himself unable to deny Dean this. He would have stayed, would have been there for Dean if only he had asked. He had not known then in those last days how Dean had come to need him, to rely on him when all hope was lost. Perhaps it had been a mistake on his part to not have read the signs, to have understood that when Dean had kissed him, fucked him, had clung onto him with blunt nails digging into his shoulders and channeled all his anger, and need, and desire into breaking them apart that what he had truly meant was stay, please, Cas, stay. But Cas is only just learning how to understand what it is to experience human emotions, while Dean spent a great deal of effort in masking his own.

‘Yes.’ he says, and Dean looks up at him through wet lashes. ‘Yes, Dean.’

-

It’s been ten weeks since the apocalypse never happened. They’ve spent the time researching various spots of supernatural phenomenon, ones with a history of being linked to the Devil, or suspected hell gates. John Winchester’s obsession had led him to catalogue even the deadest of ends when it came to tracking down Yellow Eyes. Dean figures it’s as good a place to start as any. After all, Azazel had been quite literally hell-bent on unleashing Satan into the world. In Dean's book, anything linked to that sorry yellow-eyed son of a bitch was worth looking into.

That Cas has agreed to stay is still something that leaves Dean wondering what is so goddamn important about him, that an angel of the Lord would give up Heaven to be with him. With his own demons and the history of random hook-ups and a solid fear of commitment. And then there’s the nightmares, the things that keep him awake every single night, leave him screaming and calling for Sam, for Mom, Dad, Bobby, Cas, Cas, Cas.

The arms that surround Dean are strong, warm, radiating with a type of barely contained power that ripples in waves of pure energy just beneath the surface. Dean gasps, once, twice, squeezes his eyes shut for a moment and counts to ten because this is reality, and not Hell, and he can’t hear his brother’s screams.

He says nothing when the arms around him tighten, pulling him closer into an embrace. Swallowing against the knot forming in his throat, Dean sighs out a name into the darkness.

Judging by the light filtering through the gauzy curtains, it must be nearing dawn. Dean thinks for a moment to forego further sleep because truthfully, he can’t remember it having been a particularly restful sleep considering the nightmares. He shifts onto his side to see a pair of intense blue eyes staring at him with a type of pity laden concertation. And please, just spare him that, Cas. Dean has dealt with these kinds of things since he was a child. Ever since he saw his own mother burn to death on his baby brother’s nursery ceiling. It’s been just one long horror show since then.

‘Another nightmare?’

‘What the hell do you think?’ The response is more spiteful than Dean intends, and he shrinks back into himself after a moment’s consideration. ‘Sorry, Cas. It’s just hard. It’s--’ He doesn’t have a chance say more before Cas’ hand is cupping his cheek, talking to him in a gentle voice.

‘What can I do, Dean? Tell me how I can help,’ Cas says, voice lulling as he presses soft kisses to Dean’s brow, one against each eyelid, along the delicate line of his nose, across the dusting of freckles, every touch of his lips followed by hushed Enochian.

Being cared after this way is foreign to Dean, but not unwelcome, and so he lets Cas soothe away the nightmares.

‘Just stay. Okay?’ It should be a simple request, but it has become one of Dean’s greatest fears. That Cas will leave him, or be forced to return to Heaven to an uncertain fate, or worse yet to be ripped away by the demons in his dreams. And he can’t do this alone.

Cas withdraws his kisses to take Dean’s face fully in his hands. ‘I could never leave you,’ he states with the same fierce conviction he might well have spoken with when he plucked Dean from the Pit. It makes Dean suddenly nervous, pinned beneath Cas’ all too intense stare.

‘Turn it down from eleven, okay?’ Dean gives a sound similar to an awkward laugh, but doesn’t make any real effort to move away from Cas, who’s still possessively holding on even as Dean feels a blush creeping along his cheeks.

It’s really all too much; they’ve had talks before about the staring, and Cas making Dean feel as though he’s the single most precious thing in the entire universe at times. It has never done any good. At a loss for much else to do, Dean gives Cas a tiny kiss in an effort to break this thing that now stretches taut between them.

‘We’re not meant to feel emotion this way. You are maddening and frustrating and the most perfect of all my Father’s creations and I swear I will not abandon you, Dean.’

Dean knows he’s full on blushing at this admission, because no one talks to him like this, no one but Cas. He looks away after a moment, flustered and still running high on the emotions left over from his dream. ‘Geez, Cas. It just makes a guy uncomfortable when you talk like that.’

‘My apologies.’

Dean knows he isn’t sorry for a moment, not when Castiel moves to capture him in a bruising kiss. This must be what it feels like to be owned, utterly possessed by another person, and Dean gives himself up freely for Cas to do with as he pleases there in the half light of dawn.

Mattress springs creak, and the headboard bangs against the wall just slightly as Cas crawls across Dean. They move as two silhouettes against the predawn light, Cas bodily pinning Dean against the bed, hips already rocking down, pressing their hard cocks together.

They break away breathless, Dean’s mouth bruised and gasping as Castiel trails wet kisses along the line of his jaw, nipping, tasting. And God, it’s too good, the things Cas has learned to do to his body to make him come undone. Dean feels the body Castiel rebuilt, all hard muscle and sinewy lines, unravelling beneath his fingers. Jolts of electrostatic that have everything to do with what Cas truly is, beneath pliant sweat slicked flesh, send thrills of pure energy up Dean’s spine.

Dean reaches between them to take their cocks in hand, jerking them once, twice, before Cas swats his hand away. The look Dean shoots Cas is honestly confused, if not a little insulted, but whatever protests or questions Dean might have spoken die on his lips as Cas stares him down - with a look at sends whatever blood flow not already there immediately south - and curls warm fingers around Dean.

Dean cannot contain the sudden groan that escapes his throat at the touch. Cas’ hand has got to be somehow hotter than the normal ninety-eight point six degrees he’s used to. ‘Nn, Cas--’

Dean makes another choked off noise that might be a moan, and he doesn’t care how wanton he sounds as Cas slides his thumb along the head of Dean's cock, teasing the slit, smearing precome around in a little swirl, and again in maddening progression as Cas presses his own aching cock against Dean’s hip with a full on moan.

Dean's fingers card through damp dark hair, pulling Castiel closer, and Dean falls into a mantra of tiny little encouragements, words of yes just like that Cas, come on, just like that, baby.

Cas comes with a shout, face pressed into the sweat slick curve of Dean’s neck, eyes screwed tight, as he spills himself hot and wet.

Dean’s orgasm hits him so hard that he sees stars, or maybe it’s the freaking Aurora Borealis, shapes moving in brilliant colours before his eyes. A handjob shouldn’t be that good, then again, he has no control against which he can make an accurate comparison, because nothing with Cas has or ever will be normal. Cas had once said being a vessel was like being chained to a comet. Having sex with one is like a supernova.

Cas is there, lying across him in a lounge that would be languid if not for the way his eyes are boring into Dean’s very soul.

‘Really, Cas.’ Dean is not equipped for this adoration.

Sleepy and sated, he curls against Cas, wedging into the curve of his body and basking in the radiating heat. The faintest pink tinges on the horizon herald dawn as his body slips into tiredness. Too early anyway, and for this moment the dreams that had torn Dean from sleep seem a distant memory, hazy and clouded.

Dean wakes again sometime after nine forty-five to the sound of mid-summer rain pattering against the motel windows. Cas is curled against him still, making some soft snuffling sound into the nape of Dean’s neck.

Cas doesn’t truly need to sleep, but he has taken to going through the motions of sleeping, eating, showering, mimicking Dean’s daily routines. Dean is grateful for Cas doing his part to make this thing between them, this relationship forged with fire and Hell and death and destruction and the goddamn apocalypse, have some sense of normalcy.

Pushing himself up onto one elbow, he looks over his shoulder at Cas, who’s somehow managed to make a nest out of their bedsheets, dark hair poking out in random spikes across his pillow.

‘Hey, Rip Van Winkle, you wanna get up?’ Dean moves to poke at Cas when the angel opens his eyes and stares as if daring him to do it.

‘I don’t sleep, Dean.’

‘That looked a hell of a lot like sleeping there.’

‘I was communing with the Host.’

‘Tuning in to Angel Radio, huh?’ Dean asks without much thought, not really expecting an answer as throws his legs over the side of the bed and sets his bare feet down on the ratty carpet. ‘Need to shower. Want to fly out and grab us some coffee?’

It’s one of the more trivial perks of sleeping with an angel. Breakfast delivered by air. He’d spoiled Dean with apple strudels and fresh coffee from Vienna on more than one occasion, Cas seemingly intent on lavishing him with ridiculous small luxuries if it would for even a moment dull the constant ache inside.

Cas is already fully awake and dressed by the time Dean stands, and yeah he guesses that’s another one of the perks. No arguing over who gets the shower first in the morning like he used to with Sam, though he wouldn’t be opposed to Cas joining him either. They’ve spent many a morning using up all the hot water as hands slide along bodies made slick with soap.

Dean is about to suggest that Cas just forget the coffee, come and join him for some morning shower sex, when he hears the familiar sound of wings.

-

When Castiel chooses to stay with Dean Winchester, he does so with the knowledge that in time his Heavenly powers will fade. It is something that he has expected, but is wholly unprepared to experience.

The bird’s a tiny thing, mottled grey and brown feathers, beak frozen in shock from the force of the blow. Cas sets the travel tray of coffee and paper bag of donuts against the Impala’s roof, and stoops down to gently take the lifeless bird into his palm, cradling it as he waits for his grace to swell, to will life back into the small sparrow.

When he enters their motel room, his face is grim, eyes haunted.

Dean’s fresh from his shower, damp towel draped carelessly across the foot of the bed, hair sticking up in uneven wet spikes, clad in jeans and a t-shirt. He looks up at Cas, takes in his expression. ‘What is it? You look like someone hit your dog.’ And suddenly he regrets the quip.

Cas is holding the tiny bird in his hand looking like his entire world is going to shatter around him if it doesn’t chirp at him, unfurl its wings and fly off into the late-morning sky. ‘I can’t give it life.’

‘Cas, come on man. I’m so sorry.’ Because he is, so damn sorry that this little tiny bird was unfortunate enough to run headlong into a window.

Dean remembers being a child, a tiny thing back before Mom died, stumbling across a fallen baby bird in her rose garden. Remembers his futile attempt to save the already dead bird, and his tears when Mom had found him and soothed him and helped him bury the bird. It’s barely a ghost of a memory from a life he barely knew, jarred suddenly to the forefront of his mind, shining with painful clarity.

Together they lay the sparrow to rest in the bushes outside their motel room, Dean offering some words of remembrance before ushering Cas back inside, scrubbing his hands in the bathroom sink and instructing Cas to do the same.

He reheats the forgotten coffee in the microwave, where he proceeds to pour five packets of sugar and half a carton of cream into his coffee. When Cas isn’t looking, Dean upturns his flask into the cardboard cup.

‘My grace is fading,’ Cas says after a while, his voice pained with the admission as if it is something he would rather choose to ignore.

The coffee scalds Dean’s tongue. ‘What? Your grace, how that’s happening?’

‘I willingly left the Host. As such, my powers will grow weaker, my grace finite. Do you remember after Raphael destroyed my vessel, when Bobby was injured?’

‘You couldn’t heal him.’

‘Things will become much the same, Dean. So please, I understand it is difficult for you, but don’t go running headfirst into the first demon fray you find.’

For the first time Cas realizes what it feels like to experience human loss on some small level. Understands how truly fragile mortal life is, how fragile Dean is even if his human form is anything but. He understands the need to protect, the drive to keep someone safe because he can no longer rely on his grace to be the fix-all for every situation.

‘If you were to become gravely injured, I don’t know if I’d have enough grace to heal you.’

‘I’ll draw the line at reckless driving.’

‘Dean, I am very serious.’ Cas grabs him by his shoulder, eyes alight with something inhuman in that moment. ‘You will do whatever it takes to save Sam, but you cannot do so recklessly. You owe me that.’ He had given up Heaven, was giving up his powers and his grace, all of it for Dean, and Castiel would rather be damned than see Dean throw his life carelessly away.

‘Okay,’ Dean replies.

Dean doesn’t want to have this talk. To do so will mean he’ll have to admit to things he’d rather not discuss. Because this thing, whatever it is between him and Cas, it’s not going to last. It can’t last. Knows he won’t let it, not in the end, not if it comes between Cas choosing a life with him or one in Heaven.

It had been so simple in the beginning, a mutual agreement of want and need and Dean had been too broken to tell Cas to leave him.

Dean scrubs his hand over his face, takes a sip of his coffee and wishes that things weren’t so fucking difficult. He clears his throat, tamping down his closely guarded regrets. ‘Been doing some more research on this place.’

Cas nods allowing Dean to change the conversation, because that’s why they’re here.

Why they’re currently holed up in some town that’s barely a blip on the roadmap off Highway 40 in North Carolina, checking out some local legend dating back to the eighteenth century. A forty foot circle in the middle of a clearing where nothing grew, where any objects left within its perimeter would vanish or reappear miles away. Dogs refuse to enter it, resort to territorial howls and yelps. Rumours that the Devil would dance nightly upon this patch of earth lending to its name. Whatever it is, Dean guesses it’s as good a place as any to look for a gateway straight into the Cage.

‘Wanna head out there after dark. See what we can find.’

-

It’s a 45 minute drive from their motel. Cas is in the shotgun seat flipping through John Winchester’s journal, while a song that he’s not entirely familiar with plays quietly on the radio. Dean seems deep in thought, his eyes on the winding road ahead but the set of his jaw, and the way he seems to have fallen into a trance-like state tell that he’s thinking about anything but the road.

It gets like this often enough on these drives, Dean left alone in quiet thought to mull over his life and the circumstances and choices that have landed him here. Whenever he catches Cas looking his way, Dean tries to mask how sad he truly is, how incomplete he is without his brother, and that as much as Cas has done, as much as he’s given, there will forever be a gaping hole inside him where Sam should be.

They arrive sometime after eleven, Dean determined to reach the spot by the ‘Witching Hour’, pulling the Impala over onto the shoulder, shifting her into park. Not an ideal spot, but it beats walking further than necessary and at this hour he doubts there will be much traffic. The summer heat hangs oppressive in the air, the humidity of the day having risen under the cover of night. Dean gripes about the weather as he casts a cursory look around the place. Woods on either side of the road like any other backroad he’s traversed in the American South. The persistent cacophony of crickets and frogs, and somewhere Off in the trees there’s the calls of a barred owl. ‘Nothing too spooky here, huh.’

He feels Cas’ eyes on him when he pops the trunk to sort through his weapons. Salt, holy water, slots the Colt into his belt. Sees the indignant look Cas throws him when he hands him the demon knife.

‘What? You’re running low on angel juice. We don’t know what’s out there.’ Could be nothing but another rumour, another legend made up two centuries before to scare local children, but then they can never be too prepared.

‘I can still smite a demon, Dean.’

‘Yeah, yeah,’ he slams the trunk shut, draws in a long sigh, eyes lowered, hands fussing with a flask of holy water. ‘Look, just do this.’ It’s out of concern. And like everything else Dean Winchester does, he can’t or won’t admit that he’s worried that something could go wrong, and what if something happens and Cas can’t smite a demon, what then?

Turning away from the Impala, Dean surveys the trail dotted with trees, the light of his flashlight disappearing into the woods before catching its beam on a worn wooden sign emblazoned with the words ‘Devil’s Tramping Ground’.

Once a popular camping site for adventurous teens, the place appears to be largely abandoned. Perhaps the appeal of taking your date to some allegedly haunted spot in hopes of getting to cop a feel once they got scared wasn’t what it had been back when Dean was in high school. He’s pretty sure both he and Sam used that one more times than he cares to recall in front of Cas. While Cas doesn’t seem the jealous type, it seems in poor taste.

The trek down the narrow path isn’t anything to write home about, but they keep close together, Dean occasionally casting a glance to where Cas trails only a step behind him. There’s a comforting familiarity about it all. Having one another’s back on a hunt, the camaraderie and shared stories, scars earned taking down some nasty fugly worn like military accolades, the celebratory beer toasting to another job well done. And God, he misses Sam, misses him in a way that he cannot reconcile when in moments such as these for the briefest of moments, he’s almost happy. And the guilt, he nearly chokes on it.

Cas must notice, because breaks the drawn out silence between them, voice lifting above the din of nighttime sounds, breaking Dean out of his thoughts.

Cas might as well be speaking in Enochian. The syllables foreign and ringing in Dean’s ears, ‘Huh?’

‘It’s not much further.’ Cas repeats this time, and there’s so much concern in his narrowed eyes that Dean tries to look away only to have Cas reach out and grasp his arm, forcing him to deal with this moment. ‘We don’t have to do this tonight.’ He’ll take Dean back to the motel, do more research, help him in whatever way he can, if that’s what Dean wants.

‘Guess I checked out for a minute there,’ he swipes a hand across his eyes, tries to focus, practice those calming breathing exercises he used to relentlessly torment Sam about whenever he would start doing them after one too many hours stuck in the car with Dean and his music and his ongoing tirade of pop culture references. And as much as he hates to admit it, they actually do work to calm his nerves. He offers Cas a sharp nod, ‘I’m good.’

They reach the clearing after another fifteen paces. Just dirt and pebbles and what looks like the remnants of an old camp site, as if the campers had suddenly turned tail and fled from the woods, their gear in tow. At least that was vaguely promising.

‘Seems rather anticlimactic.’ Cas observes, casting a glance around the site, flashlight beam illuminating the barren circle.

Dean scuffs a boot against the packed earth. ‘Dad seemed to think this was significant, but not sure what he was going off of. Doesn’t look like much.’

‘The Devil’s not been here,’ Cas states after a moment, because he can feel the presence of angels, fallen or not, the residual grace left behind. This wasn’t done by any angel. A high ranking demon, perhaps, but certainly not the Prince of Darkness himself.

The look Dean gives him is almost broken, just for the briefest of moments, before morphing back into his usual mask of poorly feigned indifference. Dean had wanted to believe this was a lead, a way to open a portal directly to the Cage as Sam had once opened the one at St. Mary’s. Rocks and dust kick up as Dean stomps with frustration at the charred earth.

Cas settles into a crouch, hands resting lightly against the scar of barren ground, and concentrates on the dark energy radiating still. ‘This was made by a crossroads demon. It might explain the dogs.’

‘Guess we were going on pure speculation, anyway.’ Significant, but not nearly in the way Dean had hoped. He sighs, peers up at the band of Milky Way twinkling overhead, catches a glimpse as a single star falls, exquisitely brilliant in its final moments.

Dean won’t admit that he wishes on it, wishes for his brother, wishes for them to all have a life together in the wake of the averted apocalypse because as much as he’s grateful to have Cas here with him, his world won’t ever be complete without Sam somewhere in it.

Even if Sam wants to leave, go back to school, Dean will let him, anything as long as he can have him back in this world with him, just knowing that he’s not there in the Cage, languishing in misery for all eternity. The personal punching bag for Heaven and Hell’s most dysfunctional duo.

‘We should head back,’ Dean says after a long while. He scrubs a hand over his face, worrying at the two day old stubble on his chin. This is just another speed bump, nothing they can’t get past.

There will always be another rumoured doorway to the Cage, another way in, and if not, Dean will make one. Tear the fucking fabric of reality apart if he has to. He’ll shank Lucifer himself this time if he has to.

Dean trods back to the Impala with a weary gait, kicking up dust and pebbles and bits of sun scorched grass as he does, because fuck this place and its dead end. He sets his hands against the Impala’s hood with a sigh. ‘I was so damn sure we’d find a lead here. All of Dad’s notes.’

‘I am sorry, Dean.’

‘Not your fault. Not anybody's fault, just another dead end.’ Dean bites his lip in frustration and wrenches the car door open, sliding inside as Cas hunkers down in the shotgun seat. ‘Come on, man, let’s just get some food, ‘m starving now.’

There’s no use dwelling, and Dean really hadn’t noticed how hungry he was until this very moment. A burger with extra onions and a large fry and maybe an ice cold beer, or a whole fifth of whiskey afterwards sound like the perfect remedy for this shittastic endeavour of theirs.

-

The diner is some 24-hour place off of Highway 40. Dean derives some measure of comfort from the familiarity of it all - even in the middle of Bumfuck, North Carolina - as he peruses the slightly sticky laminate menu under the glowing fluorescent lights.

The waitress is a girl who looks like she’s barely eighteen, wearing a nametag that reads ‘Courtney’, her auburn hair pulled back in a loose braid, skin bronzed and slightly freckled like she’s spent a bit too much time at the tanning salon. Her demeanour is surly at best as she returns with two sweet teas with extra lemon. Dean doesn’t blame her for not wanting to be here. What teenaged girl wants to be schlepping diner food at one in the morning?

‘What can I get for y’all, boys?’ she drawls, hazels eyes darting down to the small pad in her hand, ready to jot down their order.

Dean orders a cheddar bacon burger with extra onions and large side of fries. Cas, still new to this whole eating thing, follows Dean’s lead, opting instead for a regular burger with a side salad.

‘Sam's eating habits rubbing off on you, huh?’ Dean arches an eyebrow at Cas after Courtney trudges off to put in their order. He upturns his flask into his iced tea the moment she’s out of view, because it’s sure as all hell been one of those days.

‘I recall him saying something about you trying to give yourself a heart attack.’

‘Yeah, well, Sam’s not here to bitch now is he?’ Dean flinches a moment after he’s said the words, because it’s still so unfamiliar, the notion that Sam is not here for real, instead of just spending overtime at the library or clumsily seducing a pretty girl he met. And he wants to take it back so badly, to forget that Sam’s not here, to forget that Dean is no closer to finding a way to Sam today than he was yesterday. That they’re sitting together in some shitty diner in the middle of fuck knows where eating burgers and fries while Sam is in Hell.

‘Dean.’ Cas bumps their knees together under the table, stares at him as if he’s reading his thoughts, and says, ‘Sam wanted you to have a normal life without him. While I don’t think this was exactly what he had in mind, you must stop feeling guilty about living without him.’

Cas reaches over then, taking Dean’s hand within his own, his eyes sincere, face hiding nothing as he speaks, ‘We’ll find a way to save your brother from the Cage. You have always lacked faith when you have most needed it.’

Dean nods, unconsciously squeezing Cas’ hand in affirmation. ‘Yeah, we’ll save Sam.’

The door chimes behind them, and suddenly the atmosphere of the place changes, grows heavier, because whatever just stepped over the threshold is anything but human. They exchange looks, Dean’s hand already going for the demon blade in his coat pocket, ready to gank whatever fugly’s waltzed into this diner in the middle of the night.

Demon? Dean mouths.

Cas shakes his head because it’s not a demon, but what it is he’s not entirely sure.

A slender woman with light brown hair that falls in waves just past her shoulders, she doesn't look like much of a threat. She’s clad in a dress the colour of the sea, and when she turns to spare them the briefest of glances, Cas can see it matches her eyes. But then again, how many demons had taken on the form of pretty girls? Ruby? Meg? The countless other black-eyed bitches they’ve put down over the years?

She settles into the booth behind Dean and lazily checks her cell phone, as Courtney trudges over to take her order.

Cas stares at her over Dean’s shoulder, doing his best serial stalker impression.

‘Hey, knock it off,’ Dean hisses, because if she’s some pointy toothed monster underneath her skin, it’s best not to let on that they’re on to her. And if she’s not, well that’s just plain creepy and Dean is not really looking to get scalding coffee thrown on himself tonight.

‘She’s not human,’ Cas confirms.

‘Okay. Okay, so what then?’ Dean asks, his voice hushed, conspiratorial.

Cas shakes his head. He doesn’t know. She’s something he is not sure he has encountered before, something older than their typical garden variety monster. He’s about to say as much when she stands from her booth and saunters over to their table.

Dean pulls out the demon knife, ready to drive it through her throat the moment she tries something.

‘Whoa, there. I don’t mean you harm.’ She raises her hand, palms open. ‘I just want to talk.’

‘And who the hell are you?’ Dean is done with demons, done dealing with them no matter how helpful they pretend to be. Ruby, she’d been helpful, so deeply invested in their cause until it turned out that it was really her cause, and that cause involved getting Sam hooked on Hell’s own special brand of heroin and raising Lucifer from the Cage.

‘My name is Daphne.’ The woman extends her hand to Dean, who after a moment of hesitation takes it warily. She turns to Cas then, and adds, ‘I’ve been watching you for a very long time, Castiel.’

Cas’ eyes narrow at her words.

‘What, you think you can’t have a ‘guardian angel’ just because you are one?’ Daphne asks, brushing an errant strand of hair behind her ear.

‘You still haven’t answered my question,’ Dean interrupts before she can go any further with whatever she’s playing at.

She leans away, narrows her eyes. ‘Not really remembering your Greek myth are you?’ She waves her hand as if it’s a trivial thing. ‘That’s to be expected, I suppose. No one remembers us. I’m a Naiad.’

‘A river nymph?’

‘Daphne?’ It dawns on Cas then who she is, how old she is, even if he has no idea why a Naiad of antiquity would take an interest in his well-being. It also dawns on him that she’s incredibly ordinary, and for a moment Cas thinks that the poets must have been mistaken until she smiles, all brilliant white teeth and sparkling green eyes. And yes, there’s that grace and charm of legends.

‘Do you mind?’ Daphne gestures to the booth before settling beside Cas. She taps her fingernail thoughtfully against her coffee mug. ‘I want to help you. Honest.’

‘Why?’ Dean interjects.

His last encounter with anyone cited in Greek mythology had ended up with an all-you-can-eat human buffet, where Lucifer showed up uninvited and crashed the party, resulting in one dead archangel. In Dean's book, they’re nothing good and nothing to be trifled with, as Cas seems so intent on doing right now.

‘We’re old.’ Daphne quirks an eyebrow, green eyes suddenly burning with something ancient and powerful. ‘Did you think that Heaven could jump start the apocalypse without anyone else having a say?’

She goes silent as Courtney approaches, a tray balanced on her arm. ‘Sorry for keeping y’all waiting.’ She flashes them a forced apologetic smile and sets down their food, the smell of fried bacon reminding Dean just how hungry he is.

‘I want to help you,' Daphne says again.

‘Really? And what the hell do you know about me outside of stalking Cas here?’

‘I know many things, Dean Winchester. And I have a friend.’

‘Who is she?’

‘Someone old.’

‘You mean someone like you? Look Daphne, I really appreciate the offer--’

‘I know that you’re trying to get into Hell. Spring your brother from Lucifer’s Cage.' At the surprised look they give her, she laughs and swipes a fry off Dean’s plate. ‘Seriously, you start poking around at the Cage and didn’t expect anyone to notice?’

And suddenly Dean’s interest is piqued, because here’s a lead that’s not just notes or speculations in Dad’s journal.

‘You were out on a crossroads seven weeks ago. It wasn’t enough to summon a demon, but it did ping up on Her radar,’ Daphne continues, vague as ever, but Dean’s willing to listen to her now on the off chance that she could truly help them find a way to Sam.

‘And what’s in it for you?’

‘Call it a favour to an old friend.’ She’s already standing because her mission here is all but done. ‘Here.’ She hands Dean a small, folded slip of paper. ‘You can find her there.’

Cas and Dean exchange looks as Daphne drops a couple of dollar bills onto the table and turns away, vanishing into nothingness moments later.

A dried rose falls out from the folds of the paper when Dean opens the note. He picks up the flower absently and looks at the address written in an elegant scrawl and announces, ‘Guess we head to New Orleans, then.’

-

They’re going to have to tell Bobby what’s up. Dean has been bad at checking in, and the old hunter has been giving him space because it’s what Dean said he needed, but Bobby knows about Cas, knows about them, seems grudgingly accepting of Dean’s newfound relationship even if he’s sure John Winchester would rise from his grave if they hadn’t salted and burned his bones, to give Dean a good talking to.

Being an angel is one huge technicality, but there is no way the John Winchester he remembers whose only ‘birds and the bees’ talk was when Dean was thirteen and he handed him a pack of condoms and told him not to do anything too stupid, the one who’d have bought him a hooker for his sixteenth birthday if he didn’t already know that Dean had been having sex since the ninth grade and certainly didn’t need any help with the ladies, there’s no way he would have accepted his son as anything other than completely heterosexual.

The phone rings three times before Dean hears Bobby’s gruff voice on the other line. He sounds tired, vaguely annoyed, and Dean thinks he’s either woken him up or interrupted one of his novellas, and judging by the time of day it’s probably the latter. They all had their guilty pleasures, and Dean had found himself on more occasions than he’d like to admit to, sitting engrossed on Bobby’s sofa watching the exploits of Ricardo and Ana-Maria.

‘What are you idjits up to?’

Dean sighs, already bracing for Bobby’s reaction. ‘Uh, me and Cas. We think we got a lead.’

Silence.

‘Bobby, just listen--’

‘I’m not gonna like it, am I?’

‘Bobby, I can’t leave him down there.’

And that’s all Bobby needs to hear. He knows where this is going, and he’ll be damned if he lets that boy jump back into the fire again for Sam. For anyone for that matter. Dean's life isn’t worthless, and he has so much to offer, so much he could do with himself.

‘Put Cas on the line,’ Bobby grumbles, because this isn’t over.

‘Hello?’

It seems like his time with Dean hasn’t done much by way of improving Cas’ social skills, that some things remain the same, like his devotion toward that boy.

Bobby’s got a favour to ask, an order more like it. ‘If he wants to get Sam out, there’s no stopping him. But when this goes south, you pull him out of there. I’m not gonna lose him, too. You either.’

Cas instinctively nods. ‘I understand.’

‘What the hell are you two talking about?’

‘Be quiet, Dean.’

Dean scowls at the words, but there’s no real anger behind it.

‘Don’t talk about a guy while he’s standing just out of earshot, Bobby,’ he complains instead, because he knows they’re conspiring together.

Bobby is probably giving Cas the whole 'look out for Dean' spiel like he’s not thirty-one goddamn years old. Like Dean hasn’t ganked the fugliest of fuglies.

Cas finally surrenders the cell phone back to Dean.

‘What the hell did you tell him?’

Bobby’s voice has that tone like he’s just so done with explaining himself to Dean. ‘Told him to look after you, what’re you gonna do about it?’

‘You take care of yourself, Bobby. We’ll see you when we’re topside. Keep some beers on ice.’

‘Yeah, yeah. And Dean, you take care of yourself, son. I mean it. Don’t make me come in after you.’

-

They stop at a place nicer than their usual accommodations. Somewhere with 400 thread count Egyptian cotton sheets and fluffy white comforters, and one of those little in-room mini-fridges stocked with overpriced airplane bottles of booze and snacks.

Cas raises an eyebrow when Dean checks them into one of the suites, calls down to the front desk and orders the ‘Romance Package’ from the room service menu: chocolate-dipped strawberries served with a bottle of chilled champagne.

‘If this goes the way Daphne said it would, we could be down there for decades,’ Dean explains as he waits for the champagne to arrive.

Dean rarely splurges like this, and never before on some hook-up. A $34.95 a night room was just as suited for a bedroom romp as any place. But this is Cas, and they’ve been on the road for weeks with little time for rest and no rest in sight. For tonight, just tonight, Dean wants to make things special, treat Cas the way he should be treated before Dean throws them down into the Pit on a mission from which he’s pretty sure he won’t make it back alive.

Dean tries not to care because that’s his life, every day could be his last, a slip-up, a moment’s hesitation, and that’s it. Maybe this way he’d at least be doing something worthwhile. Saving Sam from the fire. Bringing this whole ugly mess full circle. He just wishes he wasn’t filled with such regret. For all his misery, he has also found happiness in these recent weeks. His affection toward Cas in complete contrast to the pain that’s left him gutted in the wake of losing Sam, both at odds with one another. Despite Sam’s wishes that he live a normal life without him, Dean could never shake the guilt, never live his life fully without regret and sorrow, and here Cas has given up Heaven to stay with Dean, and that stupid angel deserves so much better than the half of a life Dean can give him.

‘Then we should make this count.’

Dean gives Cas a sad smile, because yeah, they should and that’s what this is all about. Making these last moments together count. It’s not the same as when his deal had come due. There’s no frantic desperation, no final pleas or last ditch efforts to stave off the inevitable, just two people with no time left between them making the most of the moment.

Dean goes to splash water on his face, clean up after spending nine hours on the road.

‘Hey, Cas, check out this shower.’

The shower is one of life’s small luxuries, all polished ceramic tile and gleaming brass fixtures, little bottles of organic, mint-scented shampoo and bodywash displayed on a small shelf, and yes this is something they’re definitely going to have to try out together. Judging by the ridiculous length of time it takes for room service, it’ll be at least another half hour before the champagne’s delivered.

Dean’s already steaming up the bathroom when Cas walks in, having taken time to dutifully fold his clothes and set them aside. Cas steps into the shower spray behind Dean and reaches for the shampoo. They take their time washing each other, bodies slick with soap, the occasional wet kiss, and while they’re both hard within minutes there’s no real urgency behind their movements. They have all night, and Dean intends to make the most of it.

Cas’ hands move to Dean’s shoulders as he instructs him to lean forward to brace himself against the slippery tile before Cas begins kneading his shoulder muscles, working out the knots.

Dean lets out a groan accompanied by noises that sound almost like purrs. He’d been expecting a quick messy mutual handjob in the shower, something of a prelude for the rest of the night’s, as Cas had put it before, pleasures of the flesh. But this, this is too good. His body goes loose and pliant beneath Cas’ skilled hands, and he laughs softly.

‘Guess if this hunting thing doesn’t work out, you could always look into massage therapy.’

Cas’ only response is to slip his free hand around Dean’s middle, dropping lower to wrap around his rock hard cock.

And oh yes, right there Cas. Dean thrusts into the fist, soap and water slicking the way, once, twice, and it’s going to be over far too soon. Something about Cas jerking him off makes him shoot like a teenager. Dean closes his eyes, head resting against the tile and feels his balls tighten as he comes with a groan, painting the shower wall with his release a moment before the water washes it away. Dean stays there for a moment, waiting for his pulse to stop racing, for his breathing to even out because Cas' handjobs are fucking out of this world.

Dean turns after regaining his bearings and reaches down to take Cas’ cock, which hangs blood heavy and flushed between his legs in his hand, working the length in deliberate strokes, thumb swirling over the head with each pass. Only right to repay the favour.

Cas shouldn’t be this beautiful, glistening with rivulets of water running down the expanse of his chest. His eyes stare into Dean’s because he’s never learned about closing them during kissing and much less during sex, intent on wanting to watch Dean’s movements, the way Dean can make Cas come undone with his hands alone.

Dean has never wanted anyone more. Never desired another like this. He doesn’t want to think too strongly on what this means. The name of it on the tip of his tongue and completely unspeakable because it’s not something he deserves and not something he can bring into this thing between them, not now because the timing is just wrong, so very, very wrong.

He jerks Cas harder, focuses on this one goal at the moment. This he can do. Sex, he’s good at, physical desire, and Dean loves pleasure almost as much as he loves giving it.

‘Come on, baby, just like that,’ Dean murmurs as Cas thrusts into his grasp a few erratic times before spilling himself hotly over Dean’s hands.

Cas pulls them together, leans his head against Dean’s, and lets the water wash them clean.

They dry off languidly, Dean slipping into a pair of wash worn grey flannel pajama pants and a t-shirt. He pauses to admire Cas’ ass in pair of sleep pants that he’d loaned the angel until they could get around to doing some real shopping and get Cas his own wardrobe. They cling to him in all the right places. Yes, Dean Winchester was leching on his boyfriend.

Dean ignores the look they’re given when he opens to door for room service. They’re in the South, he reminds himself, and well they probably don’t take kindly to their kind down in these parts. He can’t be bothered to care, tips them, hangs the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on the door, and latches it shut.

‘Champagne and strawberries,’ Dean tells him. ‘Kind of rite of passage, it’s just something couples are supposed to do, I guess.’ This is a first for Dean, as well, never had a girl around long enough to constitute the champagne in bed thing. ‘Guess I’ve been trying to make sure we get all those firsts crossed off the bucket list.’

Cas dodges the champagne cork as it flies past him, Dean opening the bottle with a bit more flourish than required.

Dean pours two glasses, before settling on the bed beside Cas, lifting his own glass in a toast. Cas follows Dean’s lead here, still acclimating to certain human habits.

‘It’s very fizzy,’ Cas notes after taking a sip.

‘D’you like it?’

Cas takes another sip, focuses on how the bubbles curl against his palate, and smiles. ‘Yes, it’s very nice.’

Dean’s smiling like a smitten schoolboy, watching Cas try his first taste of champagne, before sampling one of the strawberries, lips sliding around the red berry in a way that normally Dean would find almost obscene if not for the way Cas is taking such simple pleasure in the taste of something new, and that’s feeling’s back. That swelling in his chest that makes his heart beat a little faster, makes his cheeks feel hot and flushed and he wants to say it, wants to tell Cas how he truly feels, but the words are caught in the back of his throat.

Dean swallows around the words, and lowers his eyes, absently focusing on the stitching in the comforter, and when he finally speaks his voice is hushed, and vaguely self-deprecating. ‘I know this is kind of cheesy. I mean, who am I trying to fool here? Myself? Sitting here drinking champagne, acting like I’m not maybe going to my own execution.’

Dean shakes his head at whatever ideas are forming there, the possibilities of a future on which he won’t let himself dwell. He lifts his head then, and leans forward until they’re bare inches from one another. When he kisses Cas, Dean tastes alcohol and berries and chocolate. He takes the champagne from Cas’ slackening hand, sets it on the nightstand along with his own before moving to straddle Cas’ slim hips, bodily pinning his friend beneath him.

Dean leans forward and kisses Cas again, and again, drawing back to nuzzle lightly against Cas’ nose. It’s a type of goodbye, because there was never enough time. They kiss languidly for a long while, all curling tongues and soft moans.

Dean’s hands work beneath the worn t-shirt, sliding across Cas’ chest, memorizing with his fingertips the hard muscles beneath smooth skin, before sliding the shirt over and off. Dean tosses it to the side as he leans down to latch onto the delicate flesh above Cas’ collarbone, eliciting a sudden cry from the angel.

‘Like that?’ Dean asks, repeating the action twice, adding a little teeth into the mix.

He feels the hard press of Cas’ cock and grinds down against it as he strips off his own shirt, before reaching down to slide the soft pajama bottoms down Cas’ slim hips. Cas draws in a sharp intake of breath.

‘Don’t move.’ Dean tells him as if Cas has anywhere else to be in that moment, like he doesn’t have Cas hard and wanting, before reluctantly sliding off Cas to go rifle around in his duffle bag. He sheds the rest of his clothes before crawling back onto the bed.

Cas looks down at him, pupils lust blown as he watches Dean prepare himself for Cas’ cock with one slicked finger, then two. Dean bites his lip and cannot contain the breathy gasp when he adds a third. He slicks Cas’ cock with his other hand, movements languid, taking care to brush his thumb along the leaking head.

Here with Cas, Dean wants in way that he has never wanted before. Desires each carnal touch with such desperation. Obsession or need or lust, none can compare to what he now feels, aching for Cas to fuck him, to break him apart, to allow Dean to lay himself bare, and give himself over to completely. In Cas, he sees the tiniest glimmer of a future, one that ended before it wasn’t ever allowed to begin.

‘I wish we could have had more time.’ he confesses into the stillness of the room, the quiet broken only by their shared breathing. When Dean leans over and captures Cas’ mouth in an open mouthed kiss, it feels like goodbye.

And then Dean slides down, splits himself on Cas, feels how he bottoms out leaving no space between them, Dean’s ass and thighs pressed snugly against the sharp jut of hipbones. He does cry out then, a soft gasp as he begins to rock down onto Cas’ cock, meeting each upward thrust.

Cas fucks up into him in earnest, watches as Dean’s face falls apart in pleasure, lips parted, eyes fluttering with each sharp movement.

The world around Dean shifts and he finds himself on his back, suddenly empty and needing. Cas hovers overhead, lifting his sweat slicked legss onto muscled shoulders, before driving inside the tight heat of his body once more, moving within him in long, deliberate strokes, the head of Cas’ cock zeroing in on his prostate and pummeling against it.

Dean cries out, hand grappling for purchase on the bedsheets. ‘Please.’ he gasps, unsure of what he’s asking, just that he needs this, needs Cas, who needs very little in way of encouragement as he proceeds to fuck Dean through the mattress, the large bed with its fine Egyptian cotton sheets and soft down comforter rocking against the wall to the rhythm of Cas’s thrusts, of Dean’s body arching beneath his. And some vague part of Dean’s mind wonders for a moment that they’ll likely end up with a noise complaint for this. He doesn’t dwell on the thought for long before Cas reaches forward to take his cock in hand, jerking him in time with each roll of his hips.

And then Dean sees white, one hand still clutching at the sheets, the other finding its way to cling around Cas’ straining biceps, blunt nails digging into the muscle, as he lets go, come spattering across their bellies in pearlescent drops.

He lays there trembling with the force of his release as Cas drives into him with renewed purpose, chasing down his own orgasm. Cas’ hips stutter twice, and then Dean feels the flood of warmth, the way Cas grinds his cock inside one last time before his body seizes and shudders against Dean.

They’re both sticky and sated and probably are in need of another shower, but Dean cannot find the will to move. He feels the bed shift, and watches through the haze with half lidded eyes as Cas returns with a damp wash cloth to wipe them clean. Smiles when Cas leans down to press a small kiss to his lips before settling back onto the bed beside him and pulling the soft downy comforter over their naked bodies.

There’s still champagne, and they share the remainder of the bottle, lying happily satisfied in one another’s arms until Dean finally begins to doze.

When Cas is certain that Dean is asleep, he slips from the bed, walks through the dimness to part the heavy curtains and stares up at the night sky, and prays to the Father he no longer believes in that He will grant them the strength to see this through, that Dean Winchester will not be lost to the pits of Hell once more.

-

The address from Daphne's note leads them to an old double-gallery house in the Garden District. Its yard is immaculately landscaped with roses, and the smell wafts through the Impala's open windows. Nothing creepy about it from the outside, with its freshly painted wood siding and large front windows that glowed with warm light, and yet....

‘Guess this is the place, huh? How much you wanna bet she’s got wind chimes made from someone’s spine in there?’

‘We’re here because you think she can help.’

‘Yeah, and what about you? You think Daphne was lying?’

Cas hesitates, looks down at his hands in thought, recalling her words. She seemed somehow genuine in all that she said and did. ‘No. I don’t.’

That’s good enough for Dean. He pulls himself from the car, circles to the back to pop the trunk because whatever she is, whether or not Daphne was telling the honest truth, he wants to be prepared. Harpy, Telchine, maybe she’s the goddamn Sphinx. Whatever the case, he’s got weapons to take her on.

Dean is already concealing a machete beneath his jacket, when Cas shoots him a look. ‘What? We’ve got no fucking clue what’s through that door.’

‘This creature. If she’s powerful enough to open a doorway into Hell, I think she might be insulted if we entered her home, how would you say … guns ablazin’.' Cas smiles wryly. ‘If you will recall, our first meeting face-to-face started out on a rather bad note.’

Dean lets out an exasperated sigh. Last thing he wants to do is walk in unarmed, but he has to admit, however grudgingly, that Cas is probably right.

‘Fine,’ Dean concedes. He tosses the blade back into the car along with his pistol and the ka-bar he’d stashed in his boot and slams the trunk. ‘We’ll do it your way, Cas,’ he gripes and turns to trudge up the cobblestone drive with Cas following a step behind.

‘Entire place smells like roses, man,’ Dean observes, once they're standing awkwardly on the porch. He’s about to make some off colour quip about them before knocking when the front door slides open. Of course they were expected, probably just in time for dinner, and they’re terribly underdressed, except there's a good chance they are dinner.

‘I told you we should have brought the goddamn weapons.’

Cas ignores him, steps inside, and Dean has no choice but to follow.

They are greeted by the soft, bell-like tinkle of dangling crystal chandeliers stirring in the summer breeze, the soft rasp of silken fabric, and rhythmic clicking of stiletto heels on hardwood floor. A slender wisp of a woman, all petite curves clad in a silk bias evening dress the same shade of crimson as her painted lips, emerges. She’s ageless, neither young nor old, arctic blue eyes holding the depth of ages within their gaze, and hellfire, and fury, and rage.

‘Castiel,’ she says with a knowing smile, her Southern drawl welcoming in way neither had expected.

She extends a slender hand which, after a moment’s hesitation, Cas takes within his own to lift to his lips and press a reverent kiss. Dean shrugs a little at Cas’ returned greeting and guesses that he must have picked up on some type of Southern Gentry.

She laughs softly, feigning a type of modesty even though they all know she’s something old, something dark, possibly terrible beneath this guise that makes her seem more like some classic silver screen siren, with her perfectly coifed auburn hair that falls just past her bare ivory shoulders. ‘Daphne told me to expect you. Though she didn’t mention how simply charming you are.

‘And you must Dean Winchester.’ Her smile sours just a little, like week-old cream, as she continues, ‘You’ll forgive me in saying that you have quite the reputation among my kind.’

‘Your kind?’ Dean finds himself wishing not for the first time that he hadn’t left all of his weapons behind, aching for the feel of Ruby’s knife in his hand or the Colt at his side. At least something to stun the old hag when she decides to shed her skin and reveal herself as whatever toothy, bitey, belly to the ground supernatural piece of shit she truly is. He casts Cas a wary look because this is going to go all kinds of wrong in about two point five seconds and they better be prepared.

And then there’s a rasp of silken fabric as she moves, dress sliding along her legs as she kicks it from beneath her heels and turns to face Dean head-on.

‘Women, of course, charming them into your bed.’ Her reply is vaguely flippant, and she laughs again, humourlessly, terribly, as it rings out around them like an off-key bell.

She notices his hand has unconsciously moved to clutch at Cas’ sleeve, and smiles then at the tell. Oh yes, so that’s what’s up. Her smile broadens, all pearly white teeth framed in bright red, and when she speaks again her voice is cool like a long drink of water. ‘Though, women don’t seem to be your thing any longer, now are they, darling?’

Dean doesn’t respond.

She likely didn’t expect him to, as she continues on without barely a missed beat, moving back to size Cas up. ‘Now, I don’t mean to pry here, but it doesn’t seem like your own species is your thing any longer.’

Dean blanches at her words as Cas pushes past, bodily placing himself between Dean and whatever nastiness she’s hiding behind a pretty face. And Dean knows this entire shitshow was a bad idea from the very start, going off the word on some fucking nymph but if there’s a chance, even the slightest, craziest one in a million shot that she can help them save Sam, he’s willing to take the risk.

‘Oh, I know what you are, Castiel.’ Her eyes settle on his form, studying like he’s an insect pinned to a card beneath a microscope. She inhales deeply, ozone and the spark of lightning and the divine. ‘I can taste the waves of energy radiating off your skin.'

She trails four slender fingers, adorned with diamonds sparkling in the lamplight, along his cheek and leans in to whisper against his ear, ‘I can see your wings, seraph. All in tatters.’

And in this moment, Castiel knows that this is no common creature of the night. His wings never truly healed after his first descent into Hell to retrieve the Righteous Man, his white pinions sullied by the muck of sin and depravity.

When he had finally emerged from its pits with Dean’s trembling soul cradled within his own grace, his wings were singed black as a constant reminder of what it meant for an angelic being to venture into the depths of Hell, to experience a place cut off from their Father.

And yet, it had been worth it, to save Dean. To come to know him as a friend and companion, and then to truly know him body and soul, yes, it was worth the sacrifice of his once pure white wings.

‘Come with me, love.’ She winds her arm through Dean’s like he’s a beau come to call on her, escorting him down the narrow corridor, toward her parlor like the spider Cas suspects she is.

It’s a trap, something set for them by that Naiad, but for what purpose, he wonders. The old gods, and their old tricks, and how mortals fell for them.

-

The parlor is simply that. Neither Cas or Dean are certain what they expected: lamps fashioned from human bones and skinned animal hides and jars holding the unborn fetus of babies or other horrors?

Instead, it’s old Southern charm with a flair of eccentricities: crystal chandeliers sparkling overhead, antebellum decor in hues of dark red, large windows draped in tasseled velvet, and everywhere that constant perfume of fragrant roses.

She unlinks her arm from Dean’s and moves to sit on the ornate couch, patting the cushion in invitation. ‘Come, sit. You have business to discuss with me and I just can’t do that outside of my parlor. You must understand a lady has her reputation to uphold, even in times such as these.’

Dean looks to where Cas is hovering just within the doorway and jerks his head as if to tell him to come in, now, to not leave him here with her. They have business to discuss and then they’ll get the hell of out as quickly as possible, because this place is just a little too clean, a little too nice; it’s only a matter of time before she starts serving them severed limbs on fine china dishes.

Dean sits anyway, settles nervously beside her, swallows dryly, and waits to begin.

‘You want to find a doorway into Hell. Oh, don’t look so surprised, darling. I know who you are, Righteous Man.’

‘Can you help us?’

‘Yes.’

‘Will you?’

Her lips quirk into a little smile

‘She’s a witch, Dean,’ Cas warns, reaching out to pull Dean from her, to take Dean from this place.

‘I have many names,’ she replies, waving a jeweled hand for dramatic effect. ‘Crone, Hag, Goddess of the Crossroads … Mother of Angels.’

Dean shoots Cas a look to which he shrugs. Daphne had said they were old, very old, older than even the angels perhaps.

‘Oh yes, little angel, I am very, very old.’ She turns, spins in a twirl of silk and the tinkling sound of crystal and bells and the wafting smell of roses, sets two hands flat against the surface of the coffee table and smiles. ‘You would know me best as Hekate.’

‘Witch.’

‘Cas, be quiet.’

Dean holds a hand out to brush against Cas’ arm, a request that he stand down because they need her. Whatever she is, whoever she is, she might be the only one powerful or willing enough to help them.

‘With the recent regime changes, Hell’s in a state of turmoil. It’s too dangerous for a mortal to enter through the front door, but there are other ways. Passages into the arcane Underworld still remain. I travelled them once with the seasons.’

‘Persephone?’

‘The old gods of the Underworld all fled or perished under Lucifer’s reign. Your God may have created man, but he created us, as well. Gave us life and dominion over the elements, the sky, the netherworld, and then when Lucifer was cast down, the fabric of it all began to tear, the order of things unraveling until there was chaos.’

Once home to Tartarus, Hades, and Elysium, there are nine levels now, but no rhyme nor reason to them. Once the punishment had fit the sin, but if Dean’s own time in Hell is an indicator the only purpose Hell served now was to offer eternal torment and despair without reprieve.

‘Daphne said you could help us get into Hell.’

‘Yes, but I will warn you, there are much older things than demons there now.’

‘Well, tell ‘em to take a number.’

Hekate cants her head to side. ‘I can see into your soul, Dean Winchester. Can see that behind your mask you’re just a lost little boy. These are terrifying things , and you will know fear and you may be lost to it.’

‘I need your tears, your sorrow, your love. Think of your loss, Dean Winchester,’ she commands, and moves to take his hands within her own.

Dean raises his eyes to meet hers, cold and frigid and fathomless and nothing like the calm blue sea of Cas’ eyes. He swallows hard against the knot forming in his throat, and thinks how this must be some type of spell, some influence of this place. He’s not cried in weeks because there’s a type of sorrow that’s so deep, so unbearable that it leaves you hollowed out and empty with the constant ache of loss. His breath hitches in the back of his throat, catching around a choked sob and then another, tears welling in his eyes.

Cas moves to comfort Dean, despite still having little experience in dealing with human emotions, wishing to do something, anything to help ease the grief that rolls off Dean in waves.

‘Don’t, Castiel,’ Hekate warns.

She takes Dean’s face in one delicate palm to cup his cheek, thumb running along his cheekbone absently in a motion that is almost maternal. She murmurs soft words to Dean and catches the tears that slip from his eyes in a tiny ornate vial before snapping it shut.

‘That’s it, my love.’ Her lips brush against his brow and she whispers something old and arcane.

Dean crumples, falling into a near seizure on her parlor floor. She looks on with disinterest, studies her perfectly lacquered nails in the dim lamplight, and waits. Dean twitches, quakes once, twice, before a shrill scream tears from his throat, and then he’s thrashing, pleading.

Cas can’t take it any longer; he seizes Hekate by her deceptively fragile shoulders. ‘What did you do to him?’

She puts out a hand, presses it against Castiel’s chest, and he can feel the power radiating beneath her petite frame as she shoves him effortlessly away. Her voice is calm, deliberate as she speaks. ‘I need to see what he’s seen. You were there with him in the Pit.’

There’s a moment’s pause, her icy eyes regarding him with something like wonderment, or confusion as she sizes him up. She knows of angels, knows of their powers and how if he were still one they would have no need of her power. ‘Though, you’re not what you once were.’

‘I can still kill you, witch.’

She laughs humourlessly at the threat, turns her attention back to Dean who has finally gone still on the floor, caught up in hellish dreams.

Hekate brushes an errant curl of auburn behind her ear. ‘I am no ordinary witch. I have powers you can’t even begin to imagine, Castiel, with that mind filled up for millenias with nothing more than loyalty to your Father and Heaven.’

When she turns to him again, something in her face has changed, no longer the guise of a beautiful starlet but that of something ancient and powerful, eyes glowing with the light of fire and of the Moon. ‘He’s been to Hell, Castiel. Forty years is but a moment to creatures as old as you and I. But to Dean Winchester, it’s longer than he’s lived on this earth. More of a home to him than these roadside motels and--’

‘No, you’re torturing him. He can’t--’

‘Yes!’ Hekate seizes Castiel by the wrist and forces him to his knees, voice deadly serious in its command as her five-foot-two stature becomes suddenly, terribly intimidating. ‘Yes, he can. You want to find a way into Hell. A doorway. This is it.’

She jerks a hand toward Dean’s prone form, and slaps Castiel across the face for his insolence. Hekate is old and powerful and fearsome. Gods and monsters on antiquity quaked before her; she was the Queen of the Underworld before Hades took Persephone, before Lucifer had even begun to scheme against Heaven.

‘The world has changed. Hell has changed. You and your brothers and sisters tried to start the apocalypse without a thought given to the old gods. I am trapped here in this place because of your meddling. I need his memories to find a doorway in.’

Cas looks to Dean, who appears anguished, brows knitted together, eyes fluttering desperately beneath their closed lids but otherwise still, and he can’t stand idle while this ancient witch dredges up all of Hell’s nightmares. ‘We’ll find another way.’

‘Be my guest, try to break into Hell on your own without Heaven at your back. Tell me how that goes if you make it back. But make no mistake, Castiel, Dean Winchester will not survive it if you go charging head first into the Pit.’

She clicks a nail against the vial in thought, and sits again, daintily crosses her legs before adding with an entirely unpleasant smile, pearly teeth like daggers, ‘I wonder what happens to a human’s soul when they die in Hell. Makes for a very interesting little experiment, don’t you think?’

Cas closes his eyes, draws in a steadying breath. He forces his rage down into his core to let it smoulder because he will need it, he knows, before the end. He wants to wrap his hands around her pretty little neck, or drive a bloodied stake through her cold heart, because these creatures that call themselves gods are no different than the monsters and demons Dean’s hunted his entire life.

They’ll find another way, he tells himself, but it’s cold comfort. Whether he likes it or not, Hekate and her spells are their ticket into Hell.

‘Does he know that you’re in love with him?’ she asks after a while, eyes idly trailing to the gilded anniversary clock on the end table. She watches its torsion pendulum swing, counting the minutes that have passed since Dean collapsed into his memories of Hell.

‘You were correct in your assumption that we are together if that’s--’

‘I know y’all are having sex. Sex isn’t love. Love, does he know that you’re in love with him? Hopelessly, helplessly, throw yourself into the Pit to be with him with no hope of escape, love. Does he know that?’

To this, Cas sighs, shakes his head, because he knows the answer. ‘No. He doesn’t.’

Cas will keep it that way if he must because he knows that there is nothing in existence that frightens Dean more than knowing that someone would die for him without thought or hesitation.

Hekate stands, skirting past Dean’s prone form where he lies as if sleeping now. She crosses the room in a swish of fabric to where a half full bottle of absinthe rests on a table, complete with crystal glasses, a decanter of water, and cubes of sugar.

‘Some believe that the wormwood in absinthe holds hallucinogenic properties that might give you visions of foresight. To inspire and open your mind.’ Her tone is conversational as she pours two glasses, idly watching as the water swirls among the green liquid, turning it a milky white. She offers one to Cas with a small quirk of her mouth. ‘The truth is, so much of what mortals believe is pure and simple fluff, the desire to experience the divine in corporeal form, but you know this of course.

‘It goes both ways, Castiel. Gods wish to have the simple pleasures of sex and drink, to feel on some small level the fleeting fragility, but I will warn you in taking a mortal -’ Hekate sips the liquor, holds it on her palate to savour the bitter herbal bite of it before continuing cryptically, ‘You’re standing at a three-way crossroads. Before you are your friend, his brother, and the innocent that the angels plucked from Heaven with trickery and deceit. You can save but one.’

‘I won’t leave Dean.’

‘But you know he’ll ask you to do it. To save his brothers, both of them, before ever giving a thought to himself.’

‘His mission is to pull Sam from the Cage.’

‘And yours?’

‘To drag him from the Pit if he cannot.’

‘And then what? Castiel, to take a mortal lover is to know despair. Even if you succeed here, he will grow old no matter your efforts. You know the story of Eos.’

Cas’ gives her a look that is despairing because he knows the story. The goddess of dawn had fallen in love and granted immortality to her beloved, but she couldn’t stop time and give him eternal youth.

‘Why do you ask me these things?’

Hekate regards him with her light eyes for a long moment before she speaks, ‘Your story is an ancient one. It has been a very long time since a mortal dared katabasis, Castiel. I must warn you, this doorway works one way and one way only. I can let you in, but I can’t let you out. Do you think you’ll be strong enough to carry them out of Hell alone, now that your power is waning, Castiel? There’s blood magic not so unlike your Enochian ones. Old magic that can open doorways if you know the right sigils.’

She leans over, scratches something arcane onto a slip of stationery. ‘It’s yours, but first I need something from you, darling angel.’

Cas’ eyes drift to Dean; he hates the way they’re dealing with this witch, knowing that everything she offered came with a price. But for Dean he’ll do it. ‘Anything.’

‘That’s a very risky offer. But the price, is small. I need a feather. Just one,’ Hekate replies, as if it’s the simplest of things.

Cas nods, watches with trepidation as Hekate reaches out to pluck a feather from what would appear to the eyes of mortals as nothing more than air. The feather becomes corporeal in her hand, shimmery black reflecting facets of colour in the dim light.

She hands him the slip of paper and explains, ‘It must be drawn in blood and encompass those you wish to pass through to the world of the living. I trust you to know what consequences there are in allowing something else to slip through with you.’

‘Yes. Yes.’ He agrees to it all, for Dean. To get Dean out, even if Castiel is forced to shove Dean through without him.

‘Oh, and one more thing, if you’ll be a dear. If you encounter a girl, tell her that the roses are in bloom and she needs to stop by to pay me a visit. Life grows cold without family.’

It’s an awkward request, and Cas is about to say more when Dean makes a high breathy cry that causes something inside his chest to clench, and he pleads, ‘Let me, please. Hekate--’

She nods once, and Cas is crouched at his side a moment later. He fits his hand against the imprint left on Dean’s shoulder, finding it with precision even through layers of a fabric, and murmurs something in Enochian as Dean calms beneath the touch.

‘What’s that?’ she asks lazily, but her interest is definitely piqued, judging by the way she leans forward on the couch, setting both feet firmly onto the floor in front of her.

‘It’s nothing--’ Cas lies. It's nothing this witch need know about.

Dean quakes beneath his touch, gasping and choking for air as he bolts upright, green eyes wide with terror, heart racing beneath his ribcage. Cas is already helping him up, clutching at his arm. ‘What did you do?’

‘I found you a doorway.’ She’s all wicked knowing smiles as she stands, inhales deeply, taking in the scent of roses and ozone, the salt of Dean’s tears.

‘Let’s get out of here. Come on, Cas.’

They’re clinging to one another, backing away from this witch because there’s no way this is going to be good, as a vortex opens before them and they are enveloped in blinding light.

-

When Castiel descends into Hell he goes with a garrison of heavenly angels at his command. Their mission is to raise the Righteous Man from the Pit, to prevent the first seal from being broken. He arrives too late, finds Dean Winchester with a blade in his hand, watches as the pitiful creature cowers away from his holy light, razor clattering to the blood slicked stone floor of a cell. The soul strapped to his rack cries out for mercy, that their prayers have at last been answered and their pardon granted. Castiel pays them little notice, unconcerned whether their deeds in life had been deserving of such a fate. His sole duty is the Righteous Man.

‘Fear not. I am an Angel of the Lord come to free you.’

Dean looks up at him from where he’s huddled on the floor, and of all things, he laughs. A sad, broken noise erupting from his throat because what kind of sick fucking joke is Alastair trying to play on him this time? ‘Angels don’t exist.’

‘Come from your wretchedness and despair, Dean Winchester, for you are saved.’

‘You’ve got the wrong guy.’ Dean tells him, still reeking with the blood of souls he’s flayed, green eyes glittering so darkly in the dim light of this cell that they look nearly black. He stoops to retrieve his razor intent on driving it through Castiel’s heart when the angel seizes him by the shoulder, grace surging blinding white all at once, the heat of it branding Dean’s soul as he cries out in terror and agony and then is blanketed in overwhelming protection, a type of comfort he has not felt in forty years, love and compassion even as broken and abhorrent as he is. And he reaches back, grasps onto the surging warmth and light and goodness as it overtakes him because yes, this is redemption at last. Castiel tells him once more that he is saved, cradling Dean’s soul within his grace, and raises him from this place of eternal torment and despair.

Castiel lifts Dean from Hell, refashions his mortal body, sewing each muscle and tendon and nerve back together, dots each freckle along his nose and cheeks and shoulders, knows the exact colour of his eyes, and timbre of his voice. And when his work is done, he takes Dean’s soul and returns it to its mortal shell, breathing life into his still lungs, and then waits.

It is a mission, nothing more, and his duty is to watch the Righteous Man until he is ready to fulfill his greater purpose, one which even Castiel does not truly understand, only that Dean is special, touched by God, chosen by Fate.

When Castiel watches as Dean takes his first breath after breaking free from the earth, he cannot even begin to grasp the impact this single human soul will have on his entire existence, his future, and the future of the world itself. He does not know in that moment that he will come to cherish this man, come to care for his brother as his own, that he will forsake all that he has ever known to be right and good and just, abandon his duty and betray his own brothers and sisters, and God, and Fate, for the sake of free will.

Now Castiel returns to Hell once more, this time not as he was, no longer a warrior of God leading an army of angels the abyss, but one who is near fallen, one who now loves, loves greater than any angel has before, and one who knows that love alone will not be enough to see this through.

He thinks on Hekate’s words as he comes to his senses finding himself sprawled across a hard, rocky ground, pebbles pressing unpleasantly into his back. He blinks and hauls himself upright. He expects to find Dean a few meters away, but there is no trace of him.

‘Dean!’ he calls out into the nothingness that lies before him, desert dotted with stray boulders, and a murky sky that seem to spread out forever in all directions. There is no reply and he thinks for a moment that perhaps something had gone wrong. Or perhaps that Hekate had intentionally trapped him here in some form of limbo, for it might well serve her to send Dean to his eternal damnation.

He scrabbles across the loose pebbles, calls Dean’s name again.

‘Cas.’

Cas skids over to where the ground begins to slope, and peers down at where Dean lies covered in sulfurous ash, hands scraped and bloody from where there had been nothing but rock littered earth to break his fall. All superficial, nothing that Dean’s not accustomed to, nothing a little angel mojo can’t fix. He reaches up a bloodied hand as Cas hoists him up.

‘I’m okay, rough landing is all.’

The sky burns with sickly yellow clouds of sulfur. At one time they would have been able to discern which level this was, but these days there are no markers to identify them.

Cas suspects it’s one of the outermost levels, one of the more easily accessible ones with its devil’s gates. It also means that it’s one of the most likely to have roving demons looking for a way to crawl out.

They are pathetically unarmed save for Cas’ angel smiting grace, and though the angel smiting grace is a upgrade from Dean's last visit here, he’s unsure of how effective that will be now that Cas is in Hell with him, cut off from Heaven more than ever before. Dean doesn’t want to test the theory to see how much mojo his boyfriend’s got left, but grimly acknowledges that there will come a time when it may be the only thing between them and a fate far worse than death.

‘Let’s hope Lucifer’s still rocking out in District Nine.’

Because this place is chaos, and as much as Dean hates the idea of venturing that deep into the goddamn Pit, at least things will be where they’re supposed to be. He stops for a moment, holds out a hand to halt his companion, eyes darting around as he listens to the rustling scatter of what sounds like giant cockroaches, or maybe rats. Dean has to wonder a moment if Hell even has rats or cockroaches or if worldly counterparts are the only things with which his feeble human mind can equate the horrors that lurk within this place.

‘Would be nice if Hekate had given us a roadmap or something. Batteries dead on the heavenly GPS?’

Cas frowns a little, because yes, his ability to navigate Hell has been severely diminished, but he’s not completely flying blind here. ‘I’m still an angel, Dean.’

Dean thinks for a moment that he can see the shadow of Castiel’s wings, the way he unfurls them in something that meant to be intimidating. And hell yeah, it had been that first time in the barn when fuck knows what had stormed through the doors in a fountain of sparks, but now it’s just hot. Fucking hot as all hell. Maybe Cas can put those wings to good use, get them down to the Cage.

‘Don’t suppose you could use some of your frequent flyer miles?’

‘Regrettably not.’

‘Guess it’s on foot then.’

Something Dean’s definitely not looking forward to, but if it’s their only way, so be it. He stoops to check his boots for rocks, heeding the words of Muhammad Ali about the mountains ahead and pebbles in your shoe and all that jazz because they’ve got a trek ahead of themselves.

Dean stands, dusts his hands off, starts to make some quip about how this wasn’t exactly what he’d expected when Cas suggested they take some time off from hunting and hit the road together. He pauses, studies Castiel’s profile as his friend surveys the landscape before them, face drawn and grim with something that looks akin to guilt.

‘Cas.’ Dean sighs the name, crossing the short distance between them and pulling Cas into a kiss, for luck or something, mouth open and wet and demanding.

It lasts bare moments before Dean’s pulling away, cheeks slightly flushed while Cas looks as unruffled as ever - even if Dean can see it in his eyes that he’s anything but - both knowing that this could be it, their last kiss, their last moment before all hell literally breaks loose around them.

Dean grins, cocky and self assured, because this is what they do, charge headfirst into the fray. Bring on all the ugly motherfuckers Hell can throw their way, because this is what Dean was raised to do. He’s the goddamn best and now he’s got an angel at his back.

-

This level of Hell is a labyrinth of skeletal buildings, their ruins set among outcroppings of twisted rocks and against the drop of gullies. They’ve been walking for what feels like days, trudging through an expanse of desert dotted only with the ghostly silhouettes of what might have once served as whatever passed in Hell as small towns, dilapidated structures with caved in roofs and jagged broken glass in soot covered windows, because this place is a home as sure as Earth is. It had, after all, been Dean’s home once for forty long years, longer than he’d spent as a living breathing human topside, and he draws in a stuttering breath; there’s no time to dwell on those thoughts or of what he had become here, they need to just keep walking, keep moving forward until they find their way.

He shoots Cas a look from time to time as they continue on, clouds of yellow sulfurous dust kicking up with each trodding step. To Dean it seems like they're wandering directionless, walking in circles, because he swears they’ve passed those ruins before, that outcropping, and that volcanic fissure in the earth looks pretty damn familiar. This endless maze of passing the same landmark until the traveler grows weary, falls by the wayside or is ambushed by whatever lurks nearby watching and waiting for them to falter.

‘Huh.’ Dean stares out across the wasteland at what distinctly look like storm clouds. ‘What you make of that?’

‘We should probably seek shelter.’

He can’t disagree with that, and quickly surveys their surroundings for a suitable spot, hoping that its previous inhabitants have long since vacated.

They take shelter from the acid rain in one of the dilapidated buildings. Dean sets about the task of laying wards, etching devil’s traps into the hard packed earth floor with a large shard of broken shale he’s found. ‘Think these’ll work down here?’ Cas offers him a shrug because hell if he knows. Whatever the case, Dean feels somewhat safer however false it may be.

Dean’s sitting in the corner working to fashion together some blade out of rock, up their odds of survival if they come face to face with one of Hell’s nasties, when Castiel says, ‘You should try to sleep.’

‘All right. You okay? You don’t need to sleep now that your batteries are running low?’

‘I’ll be fine.’ Cas sits down and props his back against the wall, ‘I apologize that the accommodations aren’t more comfortable.’ There’s the waft of roses when pulls out the slip of stationery Hekate had given him; he studies the sigil, memorizing its angles and curves, the archaic runes.

Dean shrugs off his jacket and balls it up into a makeshift pillow before crouching down to settle beside Cas. ‘What’s that?’ he asks, glancing over to the creased paper in Cas’ hand.

‘Insurance courtesy of Hekate.’ Cas doesn’t elaborate, perhaps wishing to keep Dean from worrying about his waning grace, and more yet, blame himself for it. ‘Here,’ Cas stretches out and pulls Dean closer, ‘You’ll sleep better if you’re lying down.’

Dean lies against Cas, head cradled in his friend’s lap as he runs fingers through Dean’s short cropped hair, the touch the only real comfort to be had in this place. He knows that they can’t stay for long, every moment here putting them ever at risk of discovery, but he savours this moment knowing it could be their last.

After a long while Dean speaks, ‘Never rained before. Forty years and not a goddamn drop.’

He closes his eyes, listens to the patter of it against the roof, remembers how he had missed something as simple as rainfall, the way it would run in rivulets along the Impala’s windows while he and Sam reclined across the leather bench seats trying to catch a few hours of sleep on the side of the road in the Middle of Nowhere, USA before their next hunt.

The first time it had rained topside after Hell, he had stood in it in the parking lot of some motel outside of Pontiac, Illinois and let it soak him until he’d finally wandered back inside, shivering. Dean had said nothing to Sam before retreating to the bathroom to strip off his wet clothes and stare at himself in the mirror, at the handprint on his shoulder, at his lack of scars, at the way the eyes that stared back at him were no longer his own, far too old to belong to a man of thirty.

He’d been so raw then, in those first days following Hell, waiting for the moment that he would awake with a blade in his hand, waiting for the angels to tell him that they had made a mistake and he was being sent back to the Pit. And here he was now, willingly having thrown himself back in, listening to it rain, of all things, in Hell.

‘I wished that you would never have to come back here, and I would’ve done anything.’ Cas knows now that he would have defied God if He had commanded Castiel cast Dean back; Cas would have killed a thousand of his brothers and sisters to keep Dean safe.

‘Told you not to read my thoughts.’ Dean shifts, looks up at Cas and winds his hand around the nape of his neck, pulls him down into a kiss.

‘I should have come for Sam before,’ Cas confesses into the curve of Dean’s neck. ‘He didn’t deserve this fate, and now I may not be strong enough.’

Because angel or not, here in Hell, cut off from Heaven as he is, Cas knows there will come a time when he will need to rest, when he will falter, and he sighs, closes his eyes for a moment. It had been so much easier before. This humanity he is feeling, the slow deterioration of his grace the longer he spends around Dean, it is a weakness that they can’t afford.

‘You stayed because I asked.’

Dean thinks in that moment how selfish that request truly had been, to ask a creature of energy and power to chain themselves to a human existence. To give up Heaven for shitty roadside motels and bad diner food, and yes there was sex, lots of really hot sex, but the sex couldn’t be that good, not good enough to give up all that.

And why is it that every single thing Dean touches, he destroys? He thought that maybe having an immortal being as a friend might be the exception to this shitty ass rule but no, he’s gone and fucked up one more beautiful holy thing, and this time he’s pretty sure that even if he didn’t deserve Hell before, he deserves it now.

‘Dean.’

He knows Cas is reading his thoughts again, how nothing’s sacred or safe when he’s listening in but he’s never been able to hide from him even when he’s tried.

‘I chose you, Dean,’ Cas states. Out of all the creatures he’d witnessed in Heaven, Earth, and Hell none had ever made him pause, consider, and doubt as Dean Winchester had and he knew that even if he lived for one hundred million years, there would never be another.

-

The ground around them has turned volcanic. Molten lava bubbles from fissures in the earth while toxic fumes rise from the cracks, and the sky has turned a sickly grey. It’s a definite downgrade from the rotting cities that had at least provided them shelter from the elements, Dean thinks as he side steps a river of lava, cursing to himself over how this is complete and utter bullshit and how fucking much Hell sucks.

‘There’s something out there.’

Cas can sense that they’re being watched, have been for some time now, and he supposes it’s to be expected. A human and an angel entering the realm of Hell would definitely not go unnoticed, but whatever it is, they seem mostly disinterested with their presence, merely observing to find their motive. Whatever it is is purposely making their presence known now.

There’s the scritch scratch of pebbles and loose stones sliding down the side of the embankment. Dean braces for whatever’s going to emerge from the rocks, hopes it’s just some low level demon and nothing they haven’t taken on before even if this is their sandbox and he’s only got that one crudely fashioned blade and whatever mojo Cas has stored away. It was only a matter of time before there was some sort of confrontation and now’s as good a time as any. He flashes Cas a pointed look and takes on a stance that he hopes is intimidating enough. He’s about to attack, to jab the makeshift blade as far between the demon’s ribs as he can, maybe a few times for good measure to make sure it’s good and dead, when the form of a what appears to be man emerges from the rocks, hands raised in surrender.

‘Who the fuck are you?’

‘Why are you following us?’

‘Name’s Malthus … and that is a very good question, angel.’ His voice is vaguely discordant, accent hinting on Slavic. He steps closer, his movements slow and deliberate. Face no longer shadowed, Dean and Cas can make out his true form beneath the guise he’s wearing. So not a man, or another soul condemned to languish in this place, but a demon, full fledged, eyes like polished onyx in the hellfire.

Dean’s already planning to gank the bastard because he needs another concerned, helpful demon with a heart of gold like he needs a goddamn hole in his head. His time with Ruby playing fuck buddy and confidante to Sam had left him less than trusting of anything that called this place home.

Cas reaches out to halt Dean, hand lingering a bit too long on his arm. ‘Dean, wait.’ Under different circumstances, Cas would have gladly burnt this filthy creature to ash, but any demon who approached an angel of their accord either had something valuable to offer or was just incredibly stupid, and Cas is hoping it’s the former.

‘Answer the damn question,’ Dean supplies because he doesn’t like this. Not one bit.

‘You look like you could use a guide. Hell’s not what it used to be.’

‘Yeah, you’ll be a regular Virgil. Thanks but we don’t deal with demons.’ Not any longer, not when every single time they let one of those sons of bitches into their lives, they ended up on the losing team. He’s not looking to get himself indebted to one, not again, even if this slimy little bastard didn’t want his soul, dealing with a demon always would end badly.

‘Your kind is not known for their trustworthiness. And I would much rather end your miserable existence than allow you to lead us astray.’

‘Does he always talk like that?’

‘Only when he’s in Divine Wrath mode.’ Because he’s really waiting for Cas to go Smitey McSmiterson on this dude. All angelic fury and maybe he’ll bring out the wings for good measure.

‘I don’t want any trouble. Just thought you could use someone who knows the place.’ Malthus takes a few steps back, black eyes never leaving Cas even if it’s a futile attempt at self preservation. If the angel wants to destroy him, he won’t be able to move quickly enough to get out of the blast zone in time to save his skin. Talking seems to be working, though, so he continues with that. ‘Hell’s not the same as it was last time you were here.’

‘And who says we’ve been here?’

The demon smirks a little at the question. It makes this one uncomfortable, and he likes that. ‘Can smell the sulfur on you. You think it’s gone, that you can scrub it away.’ he inhales for dramatic effect like his some skilled perfumer savouring its pungent notes. ‘You were here a long time. Hell, it becomes a part of you, you know.’

Dean swallows, jaw clenched tight. He wants to gank this bastard as savagely as he can.

‘Relax. That shit’s like Chanel No. 5 down here.’

‘Look, we’re kind of busy. So how about you cut to the chase here, hellboy?’ He’s had just about enough of this little shit’s stalling.

Malthus has the grace to look intimidated, lifts his hands once more. ‘Every demon’s out for themselves. Me? I’ve got myself to look out for. Ones who believed in Lucifer, they’re directionless now. Can’t really have a second coming when your saviour’s locked away in a box. All the heavy hitters are cowering away trying to regroup. Asmodeus, Belial.’

‘So what, you help us in exchange for getting a one-way ticket out of the basement?’

‘Something like that.’

Dean rolls his eyes before shooting Cas a look. Is this guy for real? He turns on his heels, and stalks away with Cas in tow. They don’t have the time for this trivial bullshit. Each moment spent here could be a decade in the Cage. And anyway, he’s pretty sure it’s that way, in the direction of the endless volcanic rocks, oh and more lava, because it’s not Hell without some flowing lava.

Malthus is trailing a few steps behind them when Dean turns suddenly, points an accusatory finger at the demon and hisses, ‘Look, I don’t know what your little game is here, but there are no deals. You can help us, or we can flambe your sorry ass right now.’ Cas is up for it, no doubt, and that’s a real advantage to having an angel for a boyfriend.

He seems to consider his options for a moment, weighing the likelihood of making it out of here in something larger than an ashtray, shrugs a little because what the hell. It’s not like his situation could really get that much worse. ‘Okay, okay, so what’s the mission, huh?’

‘Break into Lucifer’s Cage,’ Cas replies.

Dean flashes him a look because he wasn’t going to play that hand just yet. ‘Let the cat out of the bag, Cas.’

No one’s dumb enough to accompany them there, no matter how desperate they were to get out. Let the Big Bad out of his box, powered up and even more pissed off than he had been the last time Sam had unwittingly sprung him loose.

‘So, you want to restart the apocalypse?’ Malthus grins jaggedly. He can do that. Maybe get himself some sweet digs for helping his dark lord and master back out into the world.

Dean rolls his eyes. Demons, so single minded. ‘No, see, Lucy promised to help me with my golf swing.’

Cas is less willing to play games with the demon, his bluntness taking away whatever element of surprise they might have, and while subtle nuances were not lost on him in the least, he was always such an unnervingly straight shooter at the most inopportune of times. ‘We need to get two souls out.’

Right. Two souls. And not just Sam, Sam, Sam, Dean reminds himself because he has to remember Adam, the one he had failed in so many ways in such a short time. Judging by the way the demon looks at them, Malthus knows where this is going because every demon in Hell knew how things had gone down in the end.

‘Friends, huh?’

‘... my brothers.’

Malthus might have smiled then. He either has the very best of luck or the very worst. Better to serve on the right hand of the Winchesters than be in their path, or maybe he’s paraphrasing.

‘Dean Winchester. Heard a lot about you.’

Of course he would know who Dean is, know what he’s done, what he had become, and Dean doesn’t want to ask whether it’s hunter, Righteous Man, or Alastair’s protege? Perhaps all of the above.

‘You’re going to want to get down to level nine. I can show you, but we’re not gonna be taking the main road.’

Delightful. So the ‘scenic route’ it is, then.

-

‘So an angel’s hitched his wagon to you?’ Malthus jerks his thumb at Cas.

Dean purposely ignores the question, keeps walking in the direction Malthus had instructed they go, exchanging looks with Cas from time to time, tiny smiles of reassurance, fingers and hands bumping against one another’s just so in small gestures of affection. They will need all the comfort they can find in one another’s company the further they descend into Hell.

The demon seems intent on continuing to grate on their nerves with his own backstory and history as one of the great princes of Hell.

‘Used to command 26 legions. All devout, ready to fight. Not so unlike you angels.’ He speaks almost with pride, like a war worn soldier drinking at the officers club and reminiscing about the good old days of pure death and destruction in the name of Lucifer. ‘Now, I like to consider myself a specialist. Weapons, armour, you name it. Arms dealer of Hell, not quite the same as a prince, but we all have our pasts. Our glory days. Dean, you were a real thing of legend down here. Second to the butcher himself.’

Dean stops at the words, doesn’t dare turn around to look at him knowing that his eyes would be haunted.

Cas’ hand rests against the demons’ shoulder in a threat, the power radiating from him a firm warning of just what he was capable of doing should Malthus continue to wear out his welcome. ‘I’d shut my mouth if I were you.’

‘I’m gonna be sick,’ Dean announces to no one in particular, and stumbles away from Cas.

He was a legend alright, a goddamn fiend who had taken such pleasure in the screams of his victims, had savoured each moment spent with a writhing, pleading, flayed soul chained to the rack. Alastair would praise and pet him and tell him what an artist he was and he had craved that praise, that acceptance that he wasn’t a failure, wasn’t just some blunt instrument. He was a visionary with the blade, and he had loved it.

Cas shoves the demon away, trailing after Dean who’s collapsed onto his hands and knees a few feet away hyperventilating. He swats Cas’ hand away when he tries to help, snarls something unintelligible. Its like dealing with a wounded animal who has resorted to feral instinct as a last line of defense. He came to Dean like this before when he first found him in Hell, his angelic glory had been a thing of terror and Dean had recoiled in horror, in fear that he was to be annihilated. Dean does not remember it, but Cas had spoke to him, coaxed him from his despair and wretchedness, lifted him from Alastair’s clutches and soothed his soul with his grace.

‘Dean.’ Cas takes his face between his hands, wills him to look into his eyes, drawing him back from whatever waking nightmare he had just fallen into.

He blinks at Cas as if coming out of a daze, his expression entirely unguarded, all his usual armour stripped away as he looks up at his angel. It’s gone in a instance, eyes hardening into something dark and serious. They have a mission and there’s no time for hesitation. His own demons will have to wait to be exorcised once they’re topside again, though he’d rather they wait forever than risk dredging up any memories his own fragile psyche had buried post-Hell. Clearing his throat, he stands, shoots Cas a look when his friend starts to reach out to steady him, because no he doesn’t want pity. They’re soldiers now, on a mission to save Sam and Adam from the Cage and that take precedence over all else.

Dean begins to walk onward, trudging ever forward, sparing Cas the barest of glances when he passes. ‘Come on. We’ve got places to be.’

-

Hell continues to stretch out before them, its landscape turning hazy and watery with blurred mirages. Overhead is a band of some galaxy that shouldn’t exist on any corporeal plane, stars twinkling in a midnight sky that provides no real darkness, only more of the same yellow tinged ashen smog that passed for daylight.

‘Where the fuck are we?’ Dean asks after a while because it feels like they’re just walking in a straight line while the mountains in the distance fail to get any closer with each mile they traverse.

‘Needed to make a detour. Don’t worry, most of what’s here’s just an illusion. None of it makes sense. What are you seeing right now?’

‘Uh … desert, and more desert. And stars.’

‘Gonna show you something that’ll cheer you up in no time,’ Malthus announces with grand flourish, reaches out into the nothingness before them. ‘Gonna need weapons.’

He’s set up a glamour to mask a doorway into what looks like the most fucked up armoury Dean’s ever laid eyes on. There’s a pile of armour stacked in a mountain at least four stories high, Etruscan, Spartan, Persian, Carolingian, Byzantine, some gleaming, others rusted or stained with grime and blood and something else that Dean suspects is probably brain matter. ‘So many warriors, fighting for God, glory, wealth, power, some of ‘em are bound to end up here,’ he goes about explaining as he tosses a Trojan helmet carelessly behind him which lands with a loud clang.

‘What you in the mood for? Fresh out of Achilles’ golden cuirass, but I might be able to set you up with some Templar maille. Whole company of ‘em ended up here sometime around the 11th century. God apparently didn’t take too kindly to them killing in his name.’

‘We need something strong enough to withstand an archangel’s wrath.’

Malthus clicks his tongue once, turns back to the mountain of armour. ‘Eh, you don’t want any of this old junk then.’

Most of Malthus’ armoury is made up of the armour of warriors who had fallen outside the grace of God. Those who were fueled by bloodlust. But as he moves past the mountain of armour, he leads them into a place where armour, gilded and gleaming, inset with fine engravings is displayed like some museum’s armour exhibit.

‘Now this, this is what I’m talking about.’ The armour winks at them in the firelight. ‘Holy knights, none of that Templar bullshit.’

‘How did you get this?’ Cas asks in wonderment, hands trailing along the gleaming surface.

‘Trade secret. You don’t work as the Hell’s own Lord of War without a few connections upstairs. Let’s just say I called in a few favours.’

Dean shoots Cas a look that’s entirely confused, because while the armour’s pretty impressive no one’s letting him in on the secret of why it’s so goddamn special.

‘It’s the armour of Galahad,’ Cas explains.

Dean knows Galahad. Remembers reading King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table to Sam when they were kids. Sam couldn’t get enough of that fantasy stuff with excalibur and Merlin and the freaking Lady of the Lake. But that was all a legend, all fairy tale stuff. He gives Cas a look that’s truly doubting.

‘All that you’ve seen and you can’t believe in a little sword and sorcery, Dean?’ Cas does have a point. After all, they’d met a freaking nymph and Hekate herself. In the grand scheme of things, was Galahad such a leap of faith?

‘I didn’t say I didn’t believe, I just--’

‘If you will recall you once denied my existence.’ And yeah, there’s that.

‘If you two are finished debating the existence of legends,’ Malthus interjects, ‘I think you’d do well to suit up for battle. Galahad …’ He scans the space for it’s matching set, a real two for one deal, ‘And Percival. A couple of holy knights, how’s that for providing the premiere service?’

The armour looks unwieldy and Dean’s not too keen on it all told. ‘And this will withstand an archangel, Lucifer?’

‘Can’t promise that, but it’s sturdy. Better than anything you’re gonna find down here and better than without it. This shit’s legendary.’

-

Cas helps Dean with his armour, sliding on the cuirass and gauntlets and pauldrons, sliding leather through shiny buckles with a slight smile on his face.

‘Didn’t realize I was going to end up some extra in a Ridley Scott film,’ Dean sulks, snapping the grated visor of his helmet down over his eyes. ‘Galahad, huh?’ he asks after a moment, not failing to notice Cas smiling admiringly at the armour. ‘You’re enjoying this.’ Oh because he knows Cas is, can see it in his eyes.

‘Galahad was a true and righteous man.’

‘Sorry you got jipped with a poor knock-off.’

‘I’m not,’ Cas replies, and it’s enough to make crimson creep along Dean’s cheeks in a flush.

Although, he has to admit Cas looks downright devastating in his own armour, all gleaming and dangerous, and fucking hot because if Cas has got this weird righteous holy I’m in love with your pure soul kink, Dean’s got one for angels. Powerful angels made of light and wrath who are all smitey and vengeful. Yeah, that’s his and he’s got it bad.

Lowering his eyes, Dean looks to the sword, lifting it to test it’s balance and weight.

‘My brothers cannot be killed,’ Cas states, watching the way the sword gleams at them. The sword could not kill an ordinary angel and Lucifer and Michael are anything but ordinary.

‘I don’t need to kill ‘em. I just want Sam back.’

‘I’m afraid that won’t happen without a fight, Dean.’ Cas expression has turned dark. He knows where this is headed, knows Dean Winchester better than he knows himself sometimes.

‘Yeah, I’m expecting that.’

And it’s back to that, the noncommittal responses to the idea that Dean’s going to his own demise.

‘If we can’t get Sam out. What then?’

‘That’s not an option.’

‘It might be.’

‘Then you leave, you go. Fly back to Heaven but I’m not leaving him there.’

‘You know I won’t.’

Dean’s face hardens at those words. Cas is a stubborn bastard, and while Dean’s pretty sure he’s already earned himself a one-way ticket back down to the Pit for corrupting an Angel of the Lord even if Cas has assured him that he has earned a place in Heaven, but Dean doesn’t want that on his rap sheet, as well.

‘You asked me to help you. That’s what I’m doing. That’s what I will continue to do because it’s my choice.’

‘I shouldn’t have.’

‘We see this through to the end, Dean. We see it through together.’

Dean shoulders past him, sinks his teeth into his lower lip, draws in a few calming breaths before turning back to Cas.

‘Okay, okay, fine. But you do not sacrifice a goddamn thing for me. We do this together. Together.’

-

There’s no true nighttime in Hell, so they judge their time to stop based on pure energy, whether or not they have the drive to press on for another indeterminate distance. They’re nearing the descent into the Pit, the proverbial point of no return, having finally reached those mountains in the distant, when upon Malthus advice, they stop. Beyond here there would be no place left to rest. And he’d ushered them into a cavern set high against the slope of the mountain.

‘Dis.’ Malthus says, pointing down into the abyss beneath them. And Dean knows of Dis, knows that he spent a good 40 years down in this place, but it was something else entirely to see it from above as Cas must have seen it when he first descended to seek out the soul of the Righteous Man.

‘Like something out of Journey to the Centre of the Earth,’ Dean comments as he stands at the entrance of the cavern looking down into the hollowed out mountain. He’s not looking forward to the descent one bit.

‘Most of the demons are going to be down there,’ Cas explains. He can see the tell-tale flicker of firelight, knows that there are villages set within the rock face. Knows how unwelcoming they will be and that they will likely have to fight for passage through. ‘This is their home. They won’t take kindly to invaders.’

It was my home, too, Dean wants to say. It’s on the tip of his tongue, but he chokes it back and turns away to seek the shelter of the cave.

‘Does it bother you?’ Dean asks sometime later with a slight waver in his voice, eyes downcast as he pretends to inspect his sword.

‘Does what bother me?’

‘The reek of sulfur.’

The words wound a part of Cas, and he is filled with indignant rage on Dean’s behalf. Malthus had no right to tell him this. He shakes his head, because no, it doesn’t. The smell of residual brimstone is undetectable beneath the leather, and whiskey, and Dean’s cologne. It would take a demon to truly detect it. It was a way to find their own topside.

‘No,’ Cas verbally confirms, reaches out when Dean doesn’t respond, forcing Dean to lift green eyes to meet his own, moving in far too close into his personal space even if boundaries were never really a thing even before their relationship had progressed into something decidedly more intimate. ‘You were never deserving of Hell. Still you carry that blackness inside you. I am an angel, Dean. It’s against my very nature to love some unholy thing.’

He captures his friend’s lips in his own, stealing whatever words of protest Dean might have made against Cas’ admission. Hell had touched him, had left him more demon than man when Cas had come for him, but his soul was still pure, and all of the demons in Hell, all the brimstone, and torment would not change that.

When Dean tries to pull away, Cas wraps a hand firmly around his wrist.

‘We shouldn’t. Malthus can hear--’

‘This is Hell, Dean.’

And Cas is right. Nothing they could do here could even compare to what the norm is.

They strip each other of their armour, Cas’ fingers sliding along metal heated by Dean’s skin, slipping under buckles and belts to free pliant flesh. His movements are careful, deliberate as he sets their armour aside. It is a great honour bestowed upon them to wear the armour of legends and he will treat it with the utmost of respect despite his desire to have Dean in the most carnal of ways.

They both know that Malthus is just out of view, perched at the mouth of the cavern keeping watch, and so they try to be as quiet as possible, muffling their usual routine of sometimes filthy exchanges to breathy sighs and shared whispers as Cas reaches between the two to take their cocks in hand.

Dean exhales a shuddering breath through his nostrils, buries his face into warm the curve of Cas’ neck, and rocks down against the sharp of his hipbone. He wants Cas to fuck him, hold him down and take him hard and fast, but they don’t have that luxury here. So he makes do with one of Cas’ fingers up his ass, while his other hand works their cocks at an erratic pace.

There’s the the shuffle of feet, and the skid of pebbles on the ground.

‘Don’t stop on account of me,’ Malthus leers. He heard them, every last sigh and gasp and slide of skin against skin.

-

Dean wakes to the sound of screams, distance, muffled. Blinks twice to get his bearings, to try to figure out where he is as he stares up at the stalactites hovering above him like spikes, or spears, or perhaps teeth in the twisted maw of some Hell dweller, like it’s something out of Star Wars and the place in which they’ve taken shelter is actually alive waiting to devour them.

He would laugh at the absurdity of the thought if not for the fact that he’s suddenly become fully aware of where they are, and the screams are very, very real and not simply the lingering memories of one of his nightmares of his last stay. Not that he’s been able to differentiate between the two ever since they got down here. What little sleep he manages has been plagued with persistent visions of Alastair, the rack, the razor as it sliced into his own soul and the way it had felt to slice into the souls of others.

Dean turn onto his side to look at Cas curled against him. His heart clenches at the sight of the angel sleeping. He had told Dean that in this place without the Host his vessel required rest, a time to recharge his battery in order to replenish his waning grace. He’s paler than Dean remembers him, his body colder to the touch, and it’s more than apparent how wrong it is for something like him to be in a place like this. An angel shouldn’t be here.

Quietly disentangling himself, he kisses Cas, tells himself this is for the best, the only way even while every fiber of his being tells him to leave this place, go back topside and return to some semblance of a life together. Make Sammy proud and not run the risk of restarting the apocalypse all over again because he can’t not stop poking and prodding at Lucifer’s Cage. ‘Wish we’d met in another life, Cas.’

Dean hefts the sword, checks his armour, all buckles and straps in place, as battle ready as he’s ever going to be. He turns to look at Cas once more, and he knows that what he feels is love, however terrified he is to admit it. Love enough to sacrifice whatever they have together to save Cas from having to venture deeper into the Pit, even if that’s a selfish kind of love. The same kind that had caused him to sell his soul for Sam’s life, to continually throw himself into the line fire to protect those he cares for without an ounce of self preservation.

‘Wouldn’t do that if I were you.’

Dean turns, shoots the demon a nasty glare. ‘What do you care?’

‘Running off like that. You’re not gonna make it alone.’

‘Get him out of here. Maybe if you’re lucky he’ll let you ride out with him,’ Dean adds the last bit with a sneer. He’d been planning on ganking the black eyed son of a bitch if they made it out of here, but maybe Cas would be more merciful. Angel and all that, not that any of the angels he’d ever met were the merciful type with fluffy wings reclining on clouds simply because those types of angels didn’t exist. Anna had been the closest to that, and had also been mostly human at the time, before she went all Glenn Close on their asses and got her own ass toasted by an archangel. A shame, because he’d like Anna. Had seen her as an ally against the forces of Heaven.

‘If you leave, your boyfriend’s going to just turn me to ash.’ The response is nonchalant like he’s not talking about his own prospective demise at the hands of one very distraught angel. ‘What? I’ve seen the way he looks at you. Like you’re the only thing keeping him together.’

Dean looks away, because it can’t be like that. Cas will go back topside, go back to Heaven and regain all his angelic powers, and forget about this whole mess in time because how important can his life be in the grand scheme of things, of how long Cas has been around, the immeasurable power and knowledge. In the face of that, Dean’s so insignificant and anyway he’s barely worthy of human friendship or compassion. Why should an angel care so much?

‘Get him out,’ Dean repeats again, turns away from the mouth of the cave to look out across the landscape of Hell. He’d send Cas back himself if he had the means, but banishing sigils likely meant nothing down here. As useless as the devil’s traps he’d etched into the ground, as useless as any pleads or prayers or frantically chanted exorcisms had been when he’d been on the rack.

‘Had thought you were smarter than this. You’re going to just get lost on your own. Just slip into nothingness.’ Hell was vast, chaotic, a single human would never make it out of here. Malthus doesn’t try to stop him, though, not any longer. If this human’s dead set on heading out on his own, so be it. His funeral, or something.

The dried earth crunches beneath his feet as he steps away ignoring Malthus because he can’t linger, if Cas were to find him he’d not be able to do this. Couldn’t, not while the angel was watching--

‘Dean?’

He stops dead in his tracks, swallows against the knot in his throat, closes his eyes for a moment and counts to ten, makes sure his mask of indifference is firmly in place before he turns. ‘Yeah, Cas?’

‘I woke up and you were gone.’

‘Yeah, too cramped in there. Making me claustrophobic.’ The lie slips off his tongue easily, and he aches because this is Cas, this is the one person he should be able to trust, but it’s so much easier to lie to save someone the pain of the truth and he tamps down the guilt, buries it deep within the lie.

The look his friend gives him is all too knowing, like he can see into his soul and he hopes to God or whoever might grant him favour that Cas can’t read his thoughts right now. If he can, Cas doesn’t say anything, and Dean knows Malthus won’t breathe a word of it.

-

Malthus has gone on ahead, to scout out their path, to secure them safe passage. He was once a Prince after all, was still able to call in some favours from those whose asses he’d helped out in the past. Not for the first time Dean wonders if he’s sold them out, gone to get one of the big bads. Despite all his help, he is still a demon and it’s only his nature to eventually betray them. He voices his concerns, griping over the fact that they’re using a demon as a guide, of all the fucked up stupid ideas. Castiel seems to only be half listening, caught in his own thoughts .

‘Castiel.’

The angel pauses, turns to stare up at where the name echoes from the rocks.

‘Castiel.’

‘Hey, what’s up?’ Dean asks, reaching out to grip Cas by his shoulder as he continues to look up at the cliffs towering above them.

‘I … I thought I heard something. My name.’

Dean nods, rubs a hand over his jaw in worry because this is Cas, and whatever has got him looking spooked can’t be good. ‘Malthus said this place plays tricks on you. Probably just the wind or something.’ He’d laugh under different circumstances, because whenever has it been just the wind?

There’s a black mass of something headed straight for them, and--

‘Oh fuck.’

The creatures are winged, gnarled, their slender bodies swathed in cobwebs, and rivulets of blood streamed from gaping sockets where their eyes should have been.

‘What the fuck are these?’

‘Erinyes. Furies.’

Hekate hadn’t been lying when she’d said there were creatures older than demons down here, creatures far more fearsome and vengeful. Dean grabs Cas, tries to drag him out of their path when one swoops toward him with an inhuman screech.

There’s nowhere to take shelter here, and Dean crouches down to avoid the swipe of talon-like fingers in the hope that they will leave them be. The beat of wings in the air becomes louder as they circle around them like vultures. They hiss Castiel’s name, reaching for him with razor sharp nails.

‘Cas. Cas.’ Dean shouts over the sound of wings, struggles against his friend when he tries to bodily place himself between Dean and the Furies, to shelter him.

‘We’ve gotta make a run for it, buddy.’ Dean looks around for an opportunity to make a break for it. ‘On three, okay?’ But neither wait for the count, seeing an opening and taking it, Dean darting away from the flurry on talons and wings, his hand firmly wrapped around Cas’.

Cas lets go, tugging his hand free because they’ll never get away like this, turns on his heels and runs back toward the Erinyes.

‘What the fuck? Cas! Castiel!’

It’s the only way to distract them, give Dean a fighting chance to get away.

The three surround Cas, cutting him off from Dean, their black leathery wings creating a barrier. Cas knows why they’ve come for him, Cas had killed his own brothers and sisters, committing the oldest and one of the most heinous of crimes. They are here to enact retribution with complete disregard for his own justification.

Dean’s frantic cries rise of above the din of the Erinyes’ screeches, and taunts, the words of accusation, of murder, fratricide.

Cas squeezes his eyes shut, accepting of this fate. Willingly gives himself up to the madness and torment that they will bestow upon him. No less than he deserves for his crimes against Heaven, his crimes against his siblings, his Father. And he would do it all again, all of it for Dean.

Cas screams, a high pitched sound that he has never before made, one of terror and agony, like these creatures are gutting him of his grace. It is a noise that no angel should make, too raw with emotion and fear for anything divine.

Dean brings his sword down on one of their wings, sharpened steel meeting thick webbed flesh and hollow bone with a sickening wet crunch, black fluid spraying from the wound and spattering across Dean’s armour and cheek. He reaches out to grab the mutilated wing and yanks. ‘Get the fuck away from him.’

The creature turns with a serpentine hiss, even without eyes Dean knows she can see him, can see the guilt, the self loathing within his soul for the deaths of his family. His father, his brother, Ellen, Jo, Ash, every person who was foolish enough to throw in their lot with Dean Winchester. The guilt of their deaths weighing upon him as heavily as if he had been the one to take their lives.

She extends a skeletal hand.

Dean assumes a defensive stance, sword still dripping with her blood, hefts its weight before slashing against her wing. ‘You get one warning.’ and raises the blade to thrust it through her slender neck. He doesn’t know if these things can actually be killed, but decapitation seems like as good place to start as any. She recoils with a hiss.

The Erinyes depart in a flurry of wings and screams, dragging their wounded sister back into the darkness with them.

Dean reaches down and pulls Cas to his feet. He doesn’t ask what Cas saw. Doesn’t really want to know because if they were even a fraction of the guilt he knows they both carry, the madness would have been unbearable.

‘What the fuck, Cas?’ he asks, wiping at the blood on his face, his tone firm, but there’s no real anger in his voice. ‘Together. We agreed together.’ The false promise is made with such ease that if Dean tells himself it enough times, he’ll be able to forget that he was on the brink of leaving Cas, sacrificing himself.

-

It’s been another day of walking across an expanse of Hell that seems to hold very little variation in way of landscape until their route narrows into a small pathway carved into the face of a cliff that towers precariously over what quite literally looks like a bottomless chasm. They pass the occasional soul left chained high against the cliff face or within some cavern, their voices echoing in wails and shrieks because they know what Cas is, that perhaps salvation has finally come after decades of torment.

Malthus is at the lead, more used to traversing these cliffs. ‘Stay together and keep calm. Don’t want to fall through the cracks.’

‘Cracks?’ Dean asks.

The demon flashes a jagged grin. ‘Place feeds off fears. Things are different here, remember. Souls up and vanish in these cliffs.’

Another one of Hell’s lovely surprises, no doubt.

The angel looks increasingly distraught the further their little expedition ventures into the lower levels of Hell, while Dean’s fists are clenched so tightly that his knuckles have gone white, his face haunted. Cas reaches out for his hand from time to time, fingertips brushing just so in their quiet reassurance, but their path has narrowed down to the point that they can no longer walk side by side, instead forming a single file procession downward.

‘Maybe you can call up some eagles to fly us back home, huh, Cas.’ Dean says after a while trying to make light of the situation, trying to downplay the way that his fear of heights is almost crippling in this place. Though, really, eagles probably aren’t the best solution then.

‘I don’t understand that reference, Dean.’

And okay, so Lord of the Rings is going to be on their must-see list when they get topside. Well, if they get topside. He’s trying to not let the crushing pessimism take over, but it’s getting harder and harder to see any kind of light at the end of this tunnel. Makes sense, he remembers during that last year before his deal had come due a demon had once said that any light at the end of the tunnel was actually hellfire, and that rings as true now as it did then. Except he had gotten out, a rare opportunity for sure. And then had willingly thrown himself back in.

If possible, their pathway narrows even more until they are forced to inch along, backs pressed to the cliff face. Dean falters when he looks down, seized with a sudden incomprehensible terror at just how high up they are with one half of the cliff shearing off into a ninety degree drop straight down into the abyss. And he can’t do this. Everything that Hell’s thrown at him this far, there’s a certain primality about this terror. Cas calls out his name, but it sounds distant, rings around him like an echo.

-

‘Dean!’ Cas calls out again, and again because he was there behind him bare moments ago. He couldn’t have slipped, Cas would have surely heard him, and hurled himself after him into the abyss in hopes that his tattered wings would unfurl and allow him flight.

‘Where did you send him?’ Cas demands, tone menacing as he raises his hand to press against Malthus’ skull, ignoring the way they’re teetering precariously close to the edge.

‘Whoa, whoa. I didn’t send him anywhere,’ he backs away, making his best attempt at moving out of the immediate blast zone. ‘Don’t fall through the cracks. This place ain’t got the same rules as up there.’

He should have known. Malthus had said this place fed off fears and there was no way Dean would have been able to calm himself from his fear of heights. How could he had allowed himself to overlook the fact that Dean had been terrified? ‘Where is he?’

The demon shrugs, ‘Don’t know. Souls go missing, sometimes demons.’

‘Do they come back?’

‘Maybe. Dunno, never seen it. Guess it’s not impossible.’

Cas feels himself go cold, so utterly helpless in that moment because if he were still as he had once been, he could pinpoint Dean’s location, find his brilliant soul among the writhing damned.

-

As disorienting as this entire little journey to the centre of Hell has been, traveling through the demonic equivalent of what he can only liken to a motherfucking stargate may be in the running for most fucked up acid trippy experience thus far. It feels like the very atoms that make up his body are sparking with fire, that he’s been ripped apart and sewn back together maybe with a few pieces in the wrong place. He’s still trying to regain his equilibrium when he legs give out beneath him sending him crashing onto something that feels nothing like the rocky, cracked earth of the previous landscape. He cracks open an eye to survey his surroundings, finds himself inside what would best be described as Hell’s sanctum, a medieval structure with flying buttresses and grand archways, and are those human skulls inset in the walls? A bone chandelier? He’d thought Crowley was above these cliches.

The persistent wails of the damned are all but silent here, and for all it’s vastness, the walls of this place seem to close in around him, the darkness lurking at all corners swallowing him up like some beast.

Well, he’s got his armour, and his sword of truth, and he can storm this dark castle.

Hands bracing on his sword to give himself leverage, Dean pushes himself upright with a stifled groan. ‘Fucking great. Just fucking great.’ Because there’s no Cas, no Malthus, doesn’t know where the fuck he is outside of the fact that this place looks important and that can in no way be a good thing. He was really hoping they could get down to the Cage without any heavy hitters paying them much noticed, but it seems no such luck. So he trudges onward, feeling far too much like some warrior of legend. Come to slay the dragon. Except there was no beautiful valkyrie waiting for him in the end. Well, maybe Cas could look cute in some blonde braids. He smiles a little at the absurdity of it, trying to keep his spirits up despite the fact that he knows how alone he is in this place, and how nothing good could possibly be awaiting him beyond this hall.

The sound of howling echos throughout the hall.

Nothing good, indeed.

Dean slowly turns. There are three hounds in all their corporeal grotesqueness, rotting flesh sagging off bones, eyes glowing with the light of hellfire. The stench of them nearly brings him crashing back onto his knees to retch in disgust, the putrid scent cloying and stifling in the back of his throat. Along with the physical horror of these vile creatures, there is a primal bone deep fear, something that courses through his entirety at the gnashing of their teeth and predatory growls.

He remembers the reek of their breath on his face, before they mercilessly sunk their claws into his chest, heedless of his cries of agony and terror, his pleading to please stop as they shredded his chest to ribbons. He had choked to death on his own blood, and the hounds had dragged his soul, still stunned by the violence of death, down into Hell.

Dean backs away. They are nearly impossible to outrun, skilled in speed and agility, evolved into terrible creatures designed to hunt and kill without remorse. This time, there’s no deal weighing upon his soul, but that will not stop the hounds now that they have caught his scent. His only choice is to fight.

Leveling his sword, he takes another step backwards. It would be a simple thing for the hellhounds to band together, to outflank him and tear out his throat. There is no room for error, no time to falter. The one in the middle edges forward, teeth bared as it unleashes a hellish snarl. Dean jabs his blade toward it, the tip slashing a gash across the hound’s snout. It lets out a shrill yelp, backs away, and Dean takes this opportunity to turn and run, scrabbling across the tile floor.

The hall with its arches and vaulted cathedral ceilings lend no refuge, and in a moment of carelessness he stumbles as the hounds advance on him. Dean can feel their rancid breath, knows that this is it, once again fated to meet his end in a violent shock of teeth and claws. He squeezes his eyes shut to spare himself horror of these final moments as his mind races with thoughts, regrets, of love, of loss, his failings, Sam, Sammy, Cas--

‘Down, girls. Wouldn’t want to waste that pretty face now would we?’

The hounds yelp, whimper, the sound of their clawed feet echoing throughout the hall as they make their hasty retreat.

The life he has led has never afforded Dean much optimism, and he knows will a bone chilling certainty that this voice belongs to some creature not to be trifled with.

A woman sits perched on a throne fashioned from what Dean suspects is surely also made from bone, maybe with its cushions sewn from human flesh and sinew. His stomach rolls at the thought.

‘Dean Winchester,’ she’s all sickly beaming smiles, ‘Look what the hellhound dragged in. Whatever brings you back to a place like this?’

And of course she would know who he is. Fucking fantastic. ‘Don’t roll out the red carpet or anything.’

‘Oh, and the famous Winchester witticisms.’

She’s dressed like a Soviet Commissar, all olive drab complete with rank boards and miscellaneous accolades, jacket lazily unfastened, and Dean wonders what sorry son of a bitch she lifted it from. She balances the hat on her knee, and gestures to her uniform, ‘Do you like it? You see, some of these demons are always getting so hung up on their hero worship of Nazis that they turn a blind eye to my favourite mass murdering regime. Thirteen point five million civilians, resorting to such acts of depravity you would even believe, and they call us demons. Really?’

‘So, what you’re working for Crowley? Thought this was his gig.’

‘Crowley? Crowley’s dead. Killed him myself.’

‘As much as I feel like I should be sending you thank you flowers--’

‘What, you think I have some motive? Really?’ she tosses her head back and laughs again, an entirely unpleasant sound ringing through the hall. ‘Girl’s gotta get up in the world. I wanted Hell, same as everyone else, plain and simple. What with Lucifer back in his box, I wasn’t going to let that smarmy salesman get the upper hand.’

‘And who the hell are you?’

‘Abaddon.’

‘Angel of the Abyss, just peachy.’ Dean knows who she is. One of the oldest, said to be an angel who had sided and fallen along with Lucifer into the Pit. Her name is Destruction.

‘You have to hand it to me, Hell’s gotten a lot hotter since I took power. I mean, look at me. Pretty easy on the eyes if I do say so myself.’ she polishes her red lacquered nails to a sheen on her jacket sleeve, checks out the pair of perky smooth breasts poking out of her blouse, ‘Vanity, my favourite of the deadly sins. Humans, all so obsessed with being beautiful. Do you know how many of you sell your souls to be thin and attractive? And then you end up here. That beautiful body rotting six feet under while you spend eternity in Hell. Guess they didn’t read the fine print, huh?’

She shifts a little on her throne, tilts her head back just a fraction to peer down at him, one perfectly arched eyebrow raised in question, ‘Did you really think you could slip into Hell without little old me noticing? I’m curious, though. Who let you in?’

‘The Goddess of the Crossroads. She says hi, by the way.’

‘Hekate? That old hag? She could have come down here herself, paid an old friend a visit, though she never did like this place after Lucifer got done remodeling the joint.’

‘Yeah, doesn’t really look like this is her type of gig any longer. Missing the champagne and velvet curtains, I’m afraid.’

‘Oh, Dean, Dean, Dean. You’d be surprised. All these old gods, gone native, trying to find their place in a world that no longer worships them. But I assure you, she’d pick her teeth with your bones. That bitch could throw a party back in the day.’

And he doesn’t doubt that, not for one second. Her Southern charm as much of disguise as the body Abaddon wears.

‘As charming as you are, Dean Winchester, I’m afraid your presence here is entirely unwelcome, but please let me show you to your accommodations. I believe they may be a bit more inhospitable than before.’ Abaddon clenches her hand around his throat, dragging him before her. She tilts her head to the side, pins him beneath her black eyes and leans in close, her breath sulfurous and burning, ‘Do you think your angel will be able to find you this time, after I’ve dropped you into the darkest, blackest pit of Hell?’

His face goes pale with horror. Dean knows that without Heaven at his back, Castiel would be helpless to find him. There would be no Angel of the Lord coming for him, fighting his way through the flames and muck and filth of the Pit to drag his soul from Perdition. How long would his mortal body survive in this place? Decades? Centuries? And then if he died, what then? Cut off from God and Heaven, would he not be condemned to Hell for eternity?

‘Wait.’

She smiles, because yes, she knows how best to apply pressure. The terror of this place, of what it had done to him before, and what it would surely do to him again, because he would break and this time there would be no angel to save him.

‘You want to negotiate. But you see, you need to have something I want, which you don’t. No one wants your soul, not when you’re already here. Can just drag you down into the flames myself, keep you locked away forever until you’re just begging for me to give you your old job back,’ she scratches her painted nails down his cheek, watching blood well from four jagged wounds with a type of disinterest. ‘I’ll admit, things aren’t quite the same without Alastair’s flare for the extreme, such artistry that one. Oh but some real promising folks have come up to bat, my pretty. The things a demon will do to prove their worth to their Queen.’ Abaddon inhales deeply, gloating a little, and flashes him another gruesome smile because pretty as the meatsuit she wears might be, in this place he can see the misshapen grinning skull beneath her painted lips.

‘Everyone always has their little agenda. Azazel’s mission was to give Lucifer the best little black dress demon blood could provide. Lilith was a lost little girl crying for her father. Crowley? Crowley was a pompous, greedy backstabber who wanted wealth and power. Me? I just like it here. Everyone’s always scratching and clawing their way out of the Pit. Which leaves me sitting pretty on the throne. Queen of Hell.’

Dean has to hand it to her, she looks pretty damn well at home here. A dark and terrible Queen. ‘All you’re lacking is a crown fashioned from the bones of babies, huh?’ Not the time, Dean, but he can’t help it. She’s going to throw him to the flames one way or another and no pleading or respect or whatever the fuck this black-eyed bitch wants from him is going to change that. Nothing to lose, right?

Except this is Hell, and pain is absolute, unforgiving, eternal.

A scream tears from his throat as Abaddon clenches her hand into a fist. The blinding pain of it making his vision white out and Dean’s heart and lungs seize up for a terrible agonizing moment. ‘That’s better. Don’t need a razor, baby, to make you scream.’

He gasps, breathless with pain. ‘Gotta do better than that, you bitch.’ Dean’s defiance is fleeting and she squeezes again, harder this time until he feels like his heart might burst in his chest.

Abaddon swings a long leg over him, leans down to where she has him pinned like a insect to a card, paralysis running through his joints leaving him at her merciless whim. She runs a hand along where his cheek is scratched open and bleeding. ‘You’ve got the prettiest eyes, Dean. I think I’ll keep them.’ She smiles and drags a painted nail just below the rim of his lower lid, relishing in the way his eye trembles, frantically looks away as if it’ll somehow stop her from digging it out of the socket. ‘Now, I know this isn’t your first rodeo, baby, but I’m afraid that you won’t wake up whole once I’m done. Not this time. The human body is a fascinating thing. The amount of pain and trauma it can endure.

‘You think Alastair was bad, but you haven’t seen my resume’. Oh the things I could do to you.’ She takes his lips in a brutal kiss, biting through his lower lip, and when she withdraws her pearly white teeth are stained with blood. ‘Such a pretty kisser, too. It’s a shame really, a damn shame. I know there are plenty of demons clamouring for another taste.’

‘Please--’ he chokes out through clenched teeth.

She kisses him again, gently this time. ‘Hush, baby. You know begging won’t get you anything down here.’

She looks on as Dean tries to thrash, but to no avail, and leans down to press red lips to his fluttering eyelid. ‘Funny thing about Hell is all those sigals and exorcisms and prayers won’t do you shit. You’re on my turf now.’

-

Dean wakes in what he suspects is a pool of blood, likely his own, can taste the sharp tang of iron and salt on his lips and in the stagnant air around him, and retches. In the dim firelight emanating the small grate overhead, he makes out the four walls of his tiny cell, hears the chorus of wails and cries from pleading souls locked away or shackled against the corridor walls, knows this because he’s been here before, or a place like it. One of Hell’s prisons. Who knows how many godforsaken places there are like this. The souls that end up here are often no different than any other, selected at random and subjected to the most heinous of tortures Hell’s inquisitors can provide. And yet, Hell had made an exception for him.

When Dean Winchester had been dragged into the Pit, all of Hell’s demons had clamoured in anticipation. Plucked from the web of chains dangling above sulfurous storm clouds charged with electrostatic and ushered into a place that looked like John Wayne Gacy’s sex dungeon, chained to the rack while the Grand Inquisitor had carved and sliced and skinned to tone deaf renditions of Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Fred Astaire. Alastair would wax poetic on the methods of Gilles de Rais, Josef Mengele, Torquemada. ‘Would’ve been proud to call them my own,’ he’d said once, but Hell was full of sick fucks who had gotten off on murder and torture while alive and Alastair preferred proteges were the ones who fancied themselves above torture. To have someone whose greatest sin was holding the value of his own life as worthless strapped to his rack, now that was the kind of challenge he had been waiting an eternity for, and Dean had played right into their grand scheme to break the first seal.

Dean shudders at the memories, waits for Alastair to step from the shadows wearing a razor edge smile, to welcome him home with a rusted blade shoved in between his ribs. Absurd, he tells himself. Alastair’s dead. Sam tore the ugly fucker apart and there was no coming back from that. But Abaddon had mentioned others, new up and coming demons who were majoring in the art of dismemberment, flaying, impalement.

He doesn’t remember being tortured beyond what Abaddon had dished out, but every part of his body aches with a type of bone deep pain and he cries out when he attempts to pull himself upright, legs protesting and crumpling beneath his weight. Judging by the single grate in the ceiling, he suspects he was quite literally dropped in a pit as Abaddon so threatened to do and there had been nothing to cushion the fall. At least two ribs are cracked, maybe a third, and he bites his lip in an effort to not cry out when he moves to drag himself to the wall, bracing his back against the stone. His armour is gone, taken to God knows where, leaving him clad in a pair of jeans, and a wash worn henley, and he realizes after a moment no shoes, not that he’ll need those in this place, not here.

Dean draws in several shuddering breaths and peers up through the tears of pain welling in his eyes at the overhead grate to assess his current predicament. Too high to reach, and even if he could, he’s in no shape to climb up.

‘Abaddon!’ he calls her name, once, twice, his voice echoing off the walls and through the grate where it is met with the wails of others left to rot in this place. No, no, no, no. He realizes now that they’re not the cries of souls being tortured.

In this place, there’s no rack, no rusted blades, or saws, or pins, needles, nails. Nothing to inflict pain, nothing to torture and maim except the lancing solitude, the maddening lonesomeness for this cell isn’t the same as the one in which he had spent thirty years with its whips and chains and hooks. This is a place where you were left, shut away to be forgotten for all eternity.

Dean rests his head between his drawn up knees, clasps his hands together, and prays, prays that even in this place Cas will hear his prayers and find him. And if not, at least this time he could die, and maybe, just maybe if there’s enough of Heaven’s Righteous Man left, he’ll not be damned to this place forever.

-

‘Demons talk,’ Cas points out, knows that under the right amount of pressure they’ll tell them everything they want to know. He remembers how Dean had told him the things demons would reveal with proper persuasion. He doesn’t need holy water or salt to loosen a demon’s lips. The threat of what he still is radiating just beneath the surface of this human vessel of flesh and bone if enough.

Malthus had told them that there was no loyalty to be had in this place any longer, that a demon would do anything to save their own skin, betray anyone to climb up another rung in the hierarchy of Hell, or to drag themselves out of the Pit back into the world. Cas intends to exploit this, and he knows that it may not make him any better than these black eyes sons of bitches with their torture but this is Dean and he would tear Hell apart at the seams to find him.

Malthus says nothing to this, keeps moving through the labyrinth of mangled structures, delipidated with centuries of chaotic storms sweeping through this wasteland, its surface nothing but sulfurous slopes and valleys and cyclones of yellow tinged smoke spinning on in perpetuity from the Pit.

‘We’ll find a demon who knows how this works. There has to be someone who knows how to find missing souls.’

‘The demons here are scavengers, driven mad. You’ll be lucky if they’re even capable of understanding you.’

‘There has to be a way.’

Malthus stops, regards Cas with hard black eyes. ‘Dean’s probably dead, or as good as.’

‘I can’t afford to think that.’

The first demon that capture gives them a toothy grin at first, his smile gleaming like jagged razors in his mouth, his defiance short lived when he realizes what he’s up against. To look upon an angel even in this place is to die. Demons still speak of the legend of the angel who entered Hell to reclaim the soul of the Righteous Man. The way the angel had laid waste to hoards of demons, little more than burnt out husks left in his wake, how he had overpowered the Grand Inquisitor, dragged a soul screaming and howling from the fiery depths.

‘My name is Volak.’ the demon tries his chances at being personable.

Cas doesn’t hesitate with formalities, grasping the demon’s throat, hand already poised against his brow ready to burn the ugly fucker out. ‘There was a man here.’

The demon, Volak laughs at first, because it’s absurd. Humans rarely entered this realm, much less willingly. ‘Haven’t seen one, but if I do you’ll be the first to know.’

The demon barely has time to scream before everything flares white. Malthus shields his face because he can still burn and this loose camaraderie he and Cas share, whatever bond they’ve formed in their mutual agreement that Hell sucks hardcore, at the very core of things they are fatal enemies. Cas drops the smouldering shell without ceremony just in time for Malthus to start pitching a fit.

‘What the fuck? You could have burnt my fucking eyes out.’

‘But I didn’t.’ It’s a small comfort because a moment’s hesitation and Malthus would be another smouldering burnt out shell lying at Cas’ feet and he suspects the angel wouldn’t have cared less. Collateral damage. Can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs and all that. He sneers at Cas, because this partnership is feeling mighty one-sided ever since Dean went MIA. Damn angel is willing to destroy everything in this place without a moment’s consideration that maybe some of the demons here aren’t necessarily the proverbial ‘bad guys’. Maybe made a few bad decisions in life, maybe fell in with the wrong crowd and ended up downstairs when their number was called, but Malthus doesn’t think of himself as one of the bad guys, not when this place was home to so many sick fucks who would gladly tear out Cas’ pinions given the opportunity.

Malthus shrugs, offers Cas a grin as uneasy as their truce, ‘Demon didn’t know. Probably don’t even know who Dean Winchester is.’

‘No. They know.’

‘Look, I know your boyfriend was something of an artist during his last stay at Hotel California, but times have changed. I guess they really should remember him though seeing how he started the apocalypse.’ Cas tells him to shut it, which Malthus does, because despite how much he’d like to get under Cas’ skin, poke and prod at his soft delicate underbelly, he’s not stupid enough to try to take on an emotionally compromised Angel of the Lord.

“We keep looking.’ Keep questioning, because one of these bottom feeding parasites has to know where Dean is.

-

‘Cas--’ He doesn’t cower away in terror as he did the last time Castiel had come to him in this place of torment and despair and found him as something closer to demon than human. The light of his grace illuminates his wings, no longer tainted, a blinding white as they unfurl before him. He looks on unafraid, at last able to perceive Castiel as he truly is. He begs, pleads for redemption, that he will once more be lifted from this pit and forgiven and made whole again.

He feels the ghostly flutter of lips against his brow, ‘Cas, please.’

The light dissipates and he finds himself once more alone in the darkness of this dank little cell. A type of ache lances through him, and for a moment he thinks he might finally break, this time not from any razor slicing at his lungs until he was choking on his own blood, but from the sheer loneliness that hollows him out. It is a fate worse than any other horror he can think of and he wants to scream, to shriek, and sob, and wail, and no, no, no, no. He can’t be trapped here forever, cut off from all other souls for eternity.

‘Abaddon!’ There is no answer. He wasn’t expecting one. She held little interest in him, only knowing that he had been a nuisance in the past and she had placed him where he wouldn’t ever bother her ilk again.

Dean huddles in the corner of his cell softly repeating the names of every demon he can recall by name. The old favourites, Belial, Asmodeus, Beelzebub, Bael, calling on the ones he knew far more intimately, Azazel, Meg, Ruby, Casey, Alastair, please, someone help. Head dropping between his knees in defeat, he sobs Castiel, Cas, Cas, Cas, where are you--

-

When Dean wakes again sometime later it is to the sound of Abaddon cracking what he can only hope are walnuts and not the knucklebones of some infant. She’s seated in an elaborate chair, all rich velvet upholstery and gilt inlay, dressed in some robe a la Francaise. A pale blue silk number embroidered with tiny floss flowers, lace decolletage stained with old blood the colour of rust. She’s smiling again. ‘Morning, sunshine.’

‘I really appreciate the historical cosplay, but Comic Con was last week.’

‘You know, I was thinking Agrippina, but there’s really just nothing like some good honest French decadence.’

‘What’s in this for you?’

‘Keeping you here? Oh nothing personal, my pretty, but you and your brother caused us a lot of trouble. Don’t want you crashing the party again, so here you are. Locked away, alone forever.’

‘Alone? Doesn’t look so alone from where I’m sitting.’

‘Oh, see that’s the fun part, Dean. You’re mortal. Those fumes are toxic, lots of side of effects, one of which is--’

‘Hallucinations. You’re not here.’

‘Good boy. And they said Sam was the smart one.’ Dean watches as she stands, her movements lightening fast, nothing more than a blur of colour, and she has him pinned to the floor. ‘Wonder what’s going on in that little skull of yours. I could crack it open like a nutshell, take a look inside, see all those dark thoughts.’

‘You’re not real.’

‘The truth, my sweet, sweet pet, is that you’ll take this over being left alone with all those thoughts, all those regrets, failings, tormenting you.’ She leans down to kiss his mouth in a parody of affection, lingering to tease at his lower lip before whispering against the shell of his ear, ‘I know all that you did. For Alastair.’

-

The demon screams, pleading with Cas to let him go.

‘This one doesn’t know anything. Same as the one before, and the one before that. I told you.’ Malthus picks at his nails with his blade, black eyes narrowed to near slits as he watches Cas with feigned disinterest.

The demon Cas in ‘questioning’ eyes glow white for a brief second before it lets out a wailing scream. Cas isn’t dealing out torture. It’s swift annihilation. Maybe it’s a mercy, oblivion instead of Hell, if it is indeed oblivion that awaits them. ‘Where do they go, huh?’

Cas regards him with unreadable eyes.

‘When you go all nuclear on them, where do they go?’

I wonder what happens to a human’s soul when they die in Hell.

Cas blinks once, twice, steadies his breathing before answering, ‘I don’t know.’ He thinks of Dean, lost somewhere in the depths of Hell. Hekate has said he would die without her help, but she hadn’t said that he would live with it, and in a moment of abject horror at the thought that Dean would die in this place and be lost to him for eternity, he shoves past Malthus, stares out across the abyss that stretches before them, and screams Dean’s name, screams until he’s hoarse. There is no answer. He knew there wouldn’t be one. He wants to fall to his knees and rent his clothes because he is an angel and he was made to find the soul of the Righteous Man. It was his greatest purpose and now he was cut off, unable to find him, lost within the Pit with no hope, no direction, no life line to Dean.

‘He was going to leave, you know.’ Malthus isn’t sure why he’s sharing this information with Castiel, it’s certainly not going to up his own chances of survival next time Cas decides to go nuclear on some demon’s ass and that next demon might just be him at the rate things are going.

‘What?’ Cas hasn’t been paying attention, not really, lost in his own mind for what might have been the past half hour or so, or maybe the past day, past week, he’s not sure any longer how to tell time. There are no clear days or nights and time seems to drag on forever while passing in the blink of an eye.

‘Dean. He was going to leave. Wanted me to make sure you got topside.’

The angel stops at the words, ‘That stupid son of a bitch.’ Of course Dean would have told him that. Would have tried to leave without him. That stupid fucking sorry son of a bitch. Rage boils just below the surface, fists clenched, he’s going to beat the shit out of that self loathing bastard, hit him and shake him and scream at him until he understands that his life isn’t worthless, that there are people in it that love him, and need him, or angels or whatever. Choking down his anger, Cas suddenly is filled with a roiling horror of knowing that he could eventually be forced to leave this place without Dean, and if so that he would in time return to Heaven, return to his duties as an angel, that without Dean he would have no reason to stay on Earth, that he would not be able to bear the loneliness. Would his time with Dean eventually be forgotten, the span of this nothing more than a tiny blip in his eternal existence? No, he thinks he would mourn forever, mourn with the vigilance of which poets spoke, the loss of legends. An angel forever mourning his mortal love. And isn’t that was this is? Just another story, another legend of gods and monsters toying with the souls of mortals. Orphic myth retold with different names and different circumstances, but in the end Castiel would be doomed to leave the underworld bereaved.

When he turns finally to look at Malthus, his eyes are alight with pure divine wrath, ‘If he dies, I will destroy each and every one of you.’ He would ensure that every creature that went bump in the night, every grotesque thing that crawled out of the Pit knew his name, knew his wrath, and trembled in fear.

Cas kills the next four demons they encounter with a vengeance, no longer questioning, just pure annihilation upon sight. Eyes flaring with brilliant light for only a moment before leaving another demon a burnt out husk on the ground.

The wasteland the are traversing gradually leads way to a road that filters into the ruins of abandoned city blocks, its rows of buildings weather worn from dust and ash.

After a while they encounter a being perched on the edge of crumbling stone wall. She has the appearance of a dark haired young woman, all draped in a dress of saffron gauze and cobwebs, her skin a sickly grey, lips tinged blue and dark eyes hollow and sunken in her face. She might have been beautiful, but Hell had done her no favours.

‘Castiel.’ her voice is low and breathy in her throat.

‘Who are you?’

‘You can call me Melly,’ she replies, still perched high atop the wall, unwilling to venture down until she has his trust. She withdraws a rose from nothingness, Hekate’s calling card. ‘You are lost. A little angel who’s lost his way, lost his love, lost his hope.’ Her voice is vaguely sing-song as she examines the rose delicately held between her thumb and forefinger, watches it with disinterest as it morphs into a shimmering black feather and crumbles to ash. ‘I should trap you down here, keep you to myself. It’s been so long since I’ve had a living breathing soul. Much less an angel. The dead can become quite mundane.’

Malthus bows dramatically to her, as if reverence will gain him her favour. ‘Malthus, my lady.’

‘I know who you are, but all you demons are the same. You think because we reside together in the squalor that we somehow have a bond? A common camaraderie, when all you are is the same sulfurous filth I have to wipe off my shoes.’ she watches the demon with a predatory stare as he cautiously backs away. ‘That’s better.’

The verbal lashing she has given Malthus is not to be unexpected. She was once the princess of the Underworld, daughter of Persephone. Her prejudice against demons is deep-seated.

‘Melinoe,’ Cas addresses her by her old name because he knows who she is even if Hekate had said that all the old gods had long since left this place.

‘It has been a long time since anyone has called me by that name.’

‘I expected someone more--’

‘Inauspicious?’ she turns, shrugs one saffron draped shoulder, ‘I can be fearsome, Castiel.’ One didn’t live within the Underworld for tens of thousands of years without developing a certain knack for it, and he suspects that under her guise she’s more creature than girl. She slides from her perch, her movements vaguely feline.

‘The poets say you can find souls.’

‘The poets often exaggerate.’

‘Please, please you must help me.’ Cas is not above begging her if he must. She may be his last hope to find Dean.

‘And why should I do that?’

‘Hekate sent us.’

Melly pauses, dark eyes flickering in the firelight. ‘I thought she knew better than to do that. I’ve seen it before. Those unwilling to accept that the life of a loved one has run its course, trying to bargain with the gods to give them a moment longer. And it all ends the same. Every single time.’ When she’s met with silence, she adds, ‘Things that are dead should stay dead.’

‘He’s not dead.’

‘He might be.’

Cas refuses to allow himself to think it.

‘You waste my time, angel,’ she tells him, her voice now harried as she casts a look behind her shoulder, shakes her head a little as if at war with some inner argument. ‘Come. It’s not safe out here.’ she might smile a little at that, the absurdity of anything in Hell being safe.

Melly leads them to an alleyway, gives a quick glance around at their surroundings, before reaching out to open a side doorway, ushering Castiel inside.

‘And him?’

As much as Cas doesn’t wish to place his trust in demons, Malthus has done nothing to cross him yet. He could have bailed back when Dean went missing, could have left him alone in the cliffs, yet he did not. ‘He’s my guide.’

Melly shrugs a little, casts Malthus a begrudging look but permits him to enter before securely locking the door with a brass skeleton key which she produces from the air. The three stand within the narrow hall way of what appears to be an old rowhouse. Something Cas would expect to find in some historic town that he and Dean had by-passed during their search for a gateway into Hell.

Melly pauses to check her reflection in the dingy mirror propped against the wall, smooths a skeletal hand over the nest of dark hair that she wears piled up on her head, and walks deeper into the house.

The abandoned hall with its broken and rotting furniture, and shattered mirrors leads into a gallery, dark and vaguely foul smelling, like mothballs or moulding carpet, and a single glasslight hangs overhead from a once ornate sconce. Like the rest of what Cas has seen, this room must have been quite inviting at one time.

Melly sways with a slight swing of her hips, kicks off one tattered shoe and then the other, utterly indifferent to the fact that this place looks like it’s been condemned. No place for anyone to live. She sidesteps an end table from where it lies toppled on the floor. Moves to pour herself a drink from the lone decanter resting on a dust covered desk, hesitating only briefly to blow a cobweb out of a glass. She lifts the glass toward Cas.

‘When was the last time you were topside?’

‘Me? 1918.’ She settles against the desk, pale lips closing around the hard crystal edge of her tumbler as she takes a long sip. ‘So many souls, even reapers have to call for backup sometimes. So after it was over, I stuck around for a few months, took in the local colour. Caught a few films, saw a couple of shows.’

Cas remembers watching a few old silent movies on the television late at night with Dean sleeping nearby after after a long evening of research. Remembers those ladies with their coifed hair and darkly kohled eyes and flowing gowns, and sees the sad ghost Melinoe has become. Though the daughter of gods she may be, Hell is unforgivable as Hekate had said.

Melly takes another drink. ‘Orpheus swayed the gods with his song. What do you offer to gain our favour, Castiel?’

He falters only for a moment, steels himself with resolve that he will give anything, anything for Dean. ‘... my Grace?’

‘A tempting offer, but what would a creature like I do with it? I’m not a demon. I’m much older than your demons.’

‘I have nothing to give,’ Cas tells her, his voice vaguely sorrowful at the admittance. ‘I will stay here with you, give you anything.’

‘Didn’t Hekate tell you not to be so frivolous with what you’re willing to offer?’ Melly makes a dismissive gesture and downs the rest of her drink, rolls the crystal tumbler between her hands for a moment in thought. ‘I will help you. She would not have if you were unworthy.’

Her eyes glitter with something darker than the dim flickering flame of the gaslight before she closes them, inhales a breath, and focuses on pinpointing Dean’s soul among the writhing masses condemned to this place.

‘He’s alive,’ she says after a long moment, ‘But … he is somewhere I cannot see.’

‘How? That’s impossible.’

‘Give me your hands,’ Melly instructs, never opening her eyes, to do so would break her connection. Cas does not hesitate, staring on with a deep intensity when she clasps his hands within her own. And then he gasps suddenly, sharply because he can feel Dean as surely as he had once felt his flayed soul.

‘I must go to him.’

The fabric of reality tears as Melly opens a portal where there was previously nothing but sulfurous air.

He shoots Malthus a look and the demon shrugs, ‘Why the fuck not.’ because he has nothing to lose, and maybe it’ll win him some brownie points with the man upstairs if he helps an angel, maybe give him a chance to redeem himself or at least make his eternity in this place a bit more meaningful, that he did something and maybe made a difference in a place without hope, to spare those undeserving of this fate.

‘This doorway is only a way in,’ she warns. Once Cas steps through, through is no easy way out. He will have to fight his way through this prison to get to Dean.

Cas turns at the last moment, remembering Hekate’s own words. ‘Hekate. She told me to tell you that the roses are in bloom and that you should stop by … I think she misses you.’

Something of a smile quirks along her lips as Cas looks back at her before the portal winks shut behind them as if it had never existed at all and all traces of Melinoe vanish with it. They find themselves in a stone corridor, its walls stained with blood and foul matter, and Cas steels himself against the sight because he has been in such a place before, but then Dean had only been the Righteous Man. The soul who God had commanded he save from the Pit, the one who had began the apocalypse and the only one who could stop it, except in the end it was not Dean but his brother who had ultimately dragged Lucifer back into the Cage. They had defied the rules set by Fate. And now, Dean was back here, held captive by Hell while his brother languished in the Cage. Dean who was no longer simply the Righteous Man, but the one who had given Cas a new purpose, to be filled with wonder and amazement after hundreds of thousands of years with only one purpose, that the soul of a single human could derail everything and make him feel in ways he had not conceived as possible. To know that he was in a place such as this filled Cas with a type of horror and despair he had never known.

The wails and cries of the damned assault them, and every instinct tells him to flee this place because it is unholy and in his fallen state without the buffer of the Host, their anguish tears at him for creatures such as he were not made to linger here, outside of the grace of their Father. But he must stay, must continue on because Dean is here, can finally feel his soul’s presence, flickering dimly amid the chaos.

They can only hope that the demons that surely await them are grunts. Creatures stationed here because they served little purpose but to guard the souls of those left to languish in solitude. Cas knows with a grim certainty that he could not face a demon of Alastair’s calibre in his current state, and he prays to his Father that had forsaken them that Dean is not being tortured, that he is not screaming and pleading, that his voice isn’t among the chorus of high pitched keening.

A skeletal hand reaches out from beneath a rusted grate, fingers putrid with decay, jagged nails clawing at Cas’ ankle. A voice hisses out like steam from a broken pipe, forming words in an ancient tongue that even angels have forgotten. He jerks away, taking several steps away from the grate to look down at a pair of black eyes peering up at him from the darkness. He can barely fathom what any soul could have done in life to make them deserving of being locked away alone for eternity.

-

He knows must be dreaming again. Reaches out to the light, to touch the softly glowing feathers, and instead comes in contact with something hard, smooth, cool to the touch, and nothing like he has imagined Cas’s wings to feel like. He wants so badly for Cas to stay with him this time, just for a moment because it’s only a matter of time before Dean wakes to find himself still in his prison, still alone cut off from any other soul.

‘Dean.’

‘Stay, just for a sec. Cas, please--’ He knows it’s a futile plea. He’s begged each time before this, and each time Cas had vanished into nothingness only moments later. After a while he stopped questioning whether or not his visions of his friend, his angel, were something brought on by Hell to torment him, and instead embraced them as moments of respite conjured up by his own mind. ‘Don’t go, Cas.’

He feels hands on his face and relaxes into the touch.

‘Dean.’ His name again, spoken more forcefully, and he flinches at the sudden slap across his cheek, not particularly hard but enough to jolt him out of this self induced stupor. He peers up through slitted eyes, see Cas hovering overhead not longer glowing with angelic grace, his features instead haggard and worn with stress and worry, his once gleaming armour stained with blood and sulfur. Dean manages a listless smile, because Cas found him, again, before he blacks out.

‘Dean!’ This time Cas’ voice is frantic with worry. He places his hand against Dean’s cheek as power surges through him, sparking at his fingertips as he heals what physical damage he can that Dean’s second imprisonment in Hell has brought on. He lets out the breath he was holding in his concentration as Dean jackknifes forward in his embrace, gasping, shuddering, wide eyes darting around in a panic. His hand clutches at Cas’ arm as his erratic breaths taper off into an even rhythm of inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale.

‘Cas?’ His voice is steady, familiar, no trace of the weak wavering timbre and Cas laughs with true relief, eyes shining with something that can’t be tears because angels do not cry, and he wants to badly kiss him, but there will time for that later.

‘We have to go.’ Cas hoists Dean onto bare feet.

‘My armour,’ he laments, because it hadn’t been an issue before, but the thought of wandering through Hell unarmed, and unprotected is entirely undesirable.

‘Malthus is working on that.’

There’s a rush of air, and Dean finds himself in the hall above his prison. ‘Thought you couldn’t fly.’ Not that he’s complaining. Climbing out would have been hell even with his healed ribs.

‘Not for long.’

They hear the familiar clanging of metal against metal intersperse with the occasional colourful swear. ‘Ask and you shall receive?’

‘Something like that.’

Malthus deposits the armour at their feet with a clank, ‘Stuff’s hard to come by, don’t go losing it on me again.’

Dean doesn’t know where Malthus found it, figured Abaddon had added it to her collection, but there’s the likelihood that it had been taken simply as something for low ranking demons to squabble over, never knowing its origin.

Cas leans in far too close as he helps Dean back into the armour. ‘I thought I lost you.’ he confesses, pausing momentarily at fussing with a buckle on the armour to lift his head and pin Dean beneath his gaze.

‘Thought you did, too.’

Cas pulls Dean toward him in a moment of unguarded affection, fingertips sliding through the fine hairs at the nape of Dean’s neck, and holds him there unconcerned that they have an audience even as Dean tenses in his arms.

‘Cas--’

‘No, don’t. I don’t need excuses. I need you to live. We’ll see this through, but in the end I need you to live, Dean.’ When Cas pulls away a fraction, Deans eyes are swimming with self doubt and his expression is broken with promises he can’t make and so Cas kisses him instead, swallows up any protests, kisses him, and holds him, and wills him to understand that he is worth saving, now, then, forever, whether he’s Heaven’s Righteous Man or just another poor broken soul.

Cas strokes his thumb over the dried blood smeared across Dean’s cheekbone. ‘I thought Crowley was above this.’

‘Crowley didn’t do this,’ Dean explains wearily, because yeah, this isn’t his style at all. They had parted on strained terms, demon and all, but torture had never seemed to be Crowley’s modus operandi. ‘Hell’s got a new head honcho. Abaddon.’

‘I wasn’t aware--’

‘But Crowley’s dead, so there’s that.’ It’s a pyrrhic victory. Dean had looked forward to the day that he stabbed Crowley in the face, but there were far worse demons in Hell, and Abaddon was now Queen Bee. ‘If we get out of here, we’re gonna have a lot of work to do, man. Abaddon, she makes Azazel look like Hot Stuff.’

‘I don’t understand that reference, Dean.’

‘Casper. Hot Stuff. It’s a cartoon with a ghost. There’s a devil … and forget it, Cas.’ Because really, it’s not worth explaining.

He checks his armour, gives Cas a once over look of approval, and flashes him a smile, ‘Ready?’

-

There’s a finality about it, a creeping sensation that this is it.

Get Sam out. That’s the mission. Anything past that, well, it’s just something he’s not even begun to hope for. Every step he’s taken, every decision made since he tried to deal at the crossroads has led him here, to this place and he’ll get Sam out, Adam if he’s fortunate enough, and then … then he can just pray to whatever being might hear his prayers here that Cas gets out with them. He’s not dared to realistically think of a life after this.

There’s a smudge on the horizon where the landscape seems to end, to drop straight off like the end of a map in some pixelated video game. It’s the end of the line, their own personal Mount Doom, and Dean falters momentarily in the wake of the knowledge that they had made it this far, that salvation was so very close for his brother, but that the very worst of their journey was about to begin. He cannot afford to falter now.

Lucifer’s Cage is like a black hole, a void in time and space. Dean was expecting something a little more literal, the place instead reminiscent of the beautiful room in an abandoned muffler factory in Van Nuys, California.

It’s less Hell’s sex dungeon with whips and chains and more Wayne Manor, stuffy decor, marble flooring, wide sweeping windows, and walls draped with tapestries and adorned with paintings of all by van Eyck, Rembrandt, Caravaggio, all depicting Hell or the Fall, Satan cast down or triumphant and it’s so fucking cliche’. Angels and their lack of taste. Dean half expects Lucifer and Michael to offer them afternoon tea and biscuits, perhaps a game of charades in the parlour, and it’s so absurd because this is Lucifer and Michael, fated to fight in the end of the days, sitting together in this place passing time like it’s some lazy Sunday afternoon.

And yet, he knows it’s all an illusion. Some strange form of comfort that they’ve projected into this realm of chaos. For Sam, there is no such peace. No manor with its creature comforts, fine tapestries, and afternoon tea. It’s Hell, pure and simple. Fire and torment and the screams of the damned. One very pissed off archangel and Satan going at it like Tyson and Holyfield with less ear biting and more uncontrollable wrath.

Malthus barely makes it past the threshold before Lucifer’s on him, the demon’s black eyes flaring with blinding light and hellfire for the briefest of moments before he turns to ash, his entire existence annihilated with a single touch.

‘Filthy creatures.’ Lucifer daintily brushes his hands together, picking soot from his perfectly manicured nails.

Dean can’t disagree with him there, but Malthus had proven himself to be a worthy ally in this and he feels an indignant rage at his sudden destruction.

‘Dean Winchester, I knew you possessed a moronic sense of martyrdom, but this is stupid even for you.’

And he can’t disagree with that either, but Dean’s always been up for a challenge.

‘I really wish I knew how to get rid of you Winchesters. But you are resilient as cockroaches.’

Free of the guise of the poor soul he’d been wearing before Sam, there’s a preternatural quality about him. Lucifer had once been beautiful, the most beautiful of all the angels, and Dean’s awed by his presence, his wings visible, glowing and shimmering with a silvery light, and then the light dissipates and he sees him for the first time as he truly is. Rotting wings unfurl about him, his flesh torn and putrid, face gaunt and a sickly shade of green, because this is the Prince of Darkness, the creature that turned Hell into this place of horror and torment and endless despair, who dragged angels with him into the Pit, turned souls into black eyed demons.

‘You were to be my vessel, Dean. It was your destiny,’ Michael states from behind him.

And yeah, about that. He wishes he knew a way to kill this giant bag of dicks, but Michael is in a league of his own. He turns warily, eyes averted, because he’s not sure if this guy can burn his eyes out here and he doesn’t really want to take his chances.

‘You may look upon me without fear.’ And Jesus Fucking Christ, does he have to speak with that same condescension, like Dean’s going to just roll over and let him have what it wants, because he didn’t let him get his way last time. Not going to happen, buddy.

The archangel is blinding in his true form. His face is many, his eyes shining with the light of the heavens and all its stars, wings pearlescent, glittering, gleaming with such radiance that Dean lifts a hand to shield his eyes. If Cas is even a fraction of this, his true form much be something of great beauty and intimidation, and it occurs to him not for the first time how insane his life has become. That a lifetime of hunting vengeful spirits and common folklore could turn into standing in the presence of two of the most powerful beings in the entirety of the universe. How insignificant his life must seem in the face of it, and yet, he speaks with a determination, of valour and bravery, ‘Well, maybe I’m going to be the one to kill you.’

‘To be the vessel of an archangel. Few are given such an honour.’ Michael tilts his head bird-like and inquisitive, a trait he’s seen on Cas more times than he can recall, but it was never this unnerving like he’s a specimen pinned to a card beneath a microscope. Angels are so fucking eerie, no different than demons in so many ways despite their instance that taking a vessel was humane, nothing like possession. Well, he remembers poor Jimmy Novak. Remembers Raphael’s vessel left in his vegetative state.

‘An honour, my ass. You know what, you’re all the same. Each and every one of the fucking supernatural pieces of shit.’ He pauses, thinks, not you, Cas. Never you, because you’re different. So different from the rest. Human in his compassion, his desire, his want, his doubt. He hopes Cas can hear him, know that he doesn’t count him among the rest, not any longer. Not since he’d thrown in his lot with Dean and Sam and defied Heaven.

Dean draws his sword, casts a glance to Cas who’s hovering nearby, ready to attack the moment this encounter goes sour as it most surely will. Neither are deluded into thinking they could just waltz in here, demand that they return Sam and Adam to them, and let them be on their way. For all the false pleasantries, there’s going to be a fight.

The manor and all its finery slips away, revealing for the first time what is a metaphysical plane, the chaotic energy of the universe surrounding them, creating as Dean has suspected a void in space, the universe swirling around them in perpetuity, nebulae and stars and galaxies that would dwarf their Milky Way. It’s Lucifer’s sandbox, his domain, as well as his prison and within its noncorporeal walls, they will play by his rules.

‘I offered Sam the world. Every vanity, every desire would be his. A life without the shackles of guilt. A life without sorrow or disappointment. A life without you, Dean.’

‘Look here you slimy bastard, that’s my little brother.’ Both of them, Dean thinks as he shoots a look toward Adam’s huddled form clinging to his older half brother and it fills him with a righteous fury that these two sick fucks would drag an innocent down into the Cage with them.

Cas places himself bodily between Dean and brothers, calling forth his wings and whatever part of his waning grace he can summon.

‘The brave little angel.’ Lucifer sneers in contempt, that an angel would align himself with a human. Betray his own kind, his own brothers to the sake of a mortal.

‘Cas, get Sam.’ Dean orders as he prepares to take them both on.

Sam is a quivering mess and Cas isn’t sure if he’ll ever be the same, if he’ll ever recover from this because while Dean had been tortured for three decades and made to torture for another, this was the Cage where he’d been condemned to play punching bag to two very bored, very pissed off, and very powerful angels.

‘Sam.’ Cas murmurs, hands cupping his face in an attempt to get his attention, ignoring the way he flinches at the touch. Cas has no idea what Sam is seeing in his head, what grotesque creature he might be in his eyes. Or maybe it is his true form that he was seeing, and Cas has to admit that it is rather intimidating, something that even Dean has suppressed from his memories of seeing him when he had come for Dean in Hell. Whatever the case, he needs Sam to look at him, to see through the horror that Lucifer has created around him, because they need to get out and Sam will have to be coherent enough to do that. ‘Sam.’ he repeats the name, searching out Sam’s eyes with his own.

‘Cas--’ Sam gasps out, looking at the angel as if waking from some long nightmare, eyes clouded but comprehending.

‘We’ve come to rescue you.’ Cas tells him. ‘Though, I’m not confident that it will be a success.’ he adds when Sam winces, looks to where his brother is taking on Lucifer. ‘Can you stand?’

Sam nods, pulls himself upright. ‘Adam, get Adam.’ he rasps, fighting off the images still swirling before him.

Cas moves to the boy’s huddled form, repeats his name several times, before turning to Sam. ‘His soul is beyond repair.’ He lays his hands upon Adam, his grace reaching out for soul. There’s no way he will survive the trauma of the Cage. Realistically, no normal human being should be able to, but Dean and Sam are anything but normal. Adam, however, Adam was never meant for this fate and it is among one of his great failings that he allowed his brothers to trick the boy into becoming Michael’s vessel. Cas knows he will not be able to deliver Adam to safety alive, but he can take his soul and return it to Heaven where he would once again know peace. It will be a cold comfort to Dean who’s opinion of Heaven is little better than that of Hell, but it is the only thing he can offer Adam. ‘It’s all right. You’re saved.’ Cas tells him and draws his soul inside, cradling it within his grace until he is able to set it free.

Cas slices open his hand with his blade, spills three perfect drops of crimson onto his armour, before dropping to a crouch and smearing his bloodied palm along the floor, drawing out the lines and archaic sigils that Hekate had given him. Panic creeps high in his chest, his vessel’s heart thundering as he concentrates on his work and not how Dean doesn’t stand a chance against his brothers.

Lucifer flings Dean across the room, the impact of him hitting the wall of the Cage knocking the air out of his lungs and fracturing at least five ribs. Stupid, stupid fucking martyr because he was in no way equipped to take on both Lucifer and Michael. Lucifer had seen him set himself up for this failure, said so himself, and now Dean was at their mercy. He cries out in pain, braces himself on his good arm and looks around. Sword, he needs his sword. Five feet away and impossibly out of reach.

‘That all you got you fucking bastards? Expected something a little more shock and awe.’ he goads them on because as long as their anger is directed at him, Cas has a chance to slip away with the other two.

It’s Michael who lands the blow that puts him down for the count, he feels the armour fold under the pressure of the attack as a pain worse than a thousand jagged razors courses through him. He doubles over, collapsing onto the floor with a weak animal sound. Somewhere he can hear Cas calling his name, shouting it, Sam too because his brother is aware, coherent, and he almost smiles at that because they had won that part of the battle. Cas had Sam, had Adam, and he would leave with them. Freeing their souls from the Cage. He’s near ecstatic with it, because this was worth it all.

And then the world comes into focus again, the ringing in his ears dying down to deathly silence, Lucifer and Michael hovering just out of reach, each glowing pure energy and power. And as the chaos quiets around him, he feels for the first time the extent of his injuries.

Dean vomits blood, knows that his ribs are likely crushed and puncturing his lungs, struggles to draw in breath, he lifts his eyes to look at Lucifer and Michael and accepts his fate. He’d gotten Sam out, Cas would see to it that they got topside. It is a death he is at peace with.

He thinks of Cas, of Sam, of the life they could have never had, the outcome he’d not dared to allowed him to think on, and waits for the killing blow as the world around him goes pure white.

-

Dean can’t breathe.

Distantly he can make out shouts, the cry of his name, once, twice, and then nothing--

Sam is curled on his side gasping for breath, trembling with the after effects of his time spent in the Cage and all of it’s horrors, but physically unscathed.

Dean’s pale as ash, lips are stained with blood. Cas struggles to remove the armour, cuirass dented with the force of that final blow, his hands slicked with blood fumble with the straps and buckles. Dean’s eyes are unfocused, fluttering rapidly in their sockets, and Cas has to summon all of his self control to keep it together in this moment. He didn’t go all the way into Hell and back a second time to lose Dean at the very end. He strips him of his armour, finds the fabric of his shirt stained dark with blood, and nearly falters.

‘Dean.’ Cas says the name like a command, an order from a superior, because he needs him to stay awake, needs him to focus, and lays trembling hands against the expanse of Dean’s chest. Feels the way his lungs no longer expand. ‘Come on, Dean.’

Sam is there at his side, pale and stunned, in shock but still he knows Dean, knows Cas, knows what’s happening, he is a hunter, a soldier trained to understand and deal with situations even under great duress. ‘But you can heal him, right?’

The look Cas gives him is stricken, ‘This is beyond my ability. I warned him, told him not to--’ he chokes on his words, watching in horror as Dean’s spasming stutters to a sudden halt. No. No, not like this. He feels something wet on his cheeks, unfamiliar and wholly unwelcome, and for a moment he thinks he might shatter, might break apart from the inside like fractured glass. ‘Dean.’

Cas cradles Dean, lips moving in silent prayer because he was a true servant of Heaven once, and if his Father had ever loved him in all his years of unwavering loyalty that he would hear his prayers now and grant him this one request. It had been within his power once, power enough to drag a soul from the Pit and refashion its body, to breath life into the unliving and make them whole.

The wavering thread of life reaches for Cas’ grace and latches on as he feels all of Heaven’s power flow through him like a shockwave, energy sparking in his fingertips, eyes alight with his grace.

Dean lurches forward in his arms with a sharp gasp.

‘Hello Dean.’ Cas smiles down at him through tears, because God had not forgotten him, had not forsaken him even if he had forsaken Heaven for Dean.

Dean lays there trying to regain his bearings as he stares up into the blinding sunlight filtering down between the clouds above. Sky, real, blue, with birds and the contrails of passing jets. No clouds of sulfur, no acid rain, or fissures in the terrestrial plain. And the ground beneath him is solid grass covered earth, dried and dusty with the summer heat. ‘Cas, did I die?’ He asks after a moment, because he’s pretty sure that was Heaven for a moment there. It might have involved apple pie and Cas wearing nothing but whipped cream. And yeah, that was definitely Heaven because there’s no way Cas would agree to that. ‘Death seemed kind of put off.’ He owes him something deep fried and artery clogging whenever he gets around to returning that ring to him for giving him one more Hail Mary.

‘Man, we really fucked that up,’ Dean notes, gesturing to the destroyed armour. Leave it to Dean Winchester to utterly trash 1200 year old legendary armour. He blinks a few times, squints up at the sun as everything comes flooding back.

‘Sam? Sam? Where’s Sam, Cas?’ His voice is suddenly frantic as he remembers why he’s here, and what had happened.

‘Here.’ The voice is so painfully familiar, and so welcome after so long without it.

Dean props himself up, turns to the direction of the voice. There are tears on Sam’s face, of happiness, of disbelief. They embrace, Dean’s own tears flowing freely because it’s so damn good to see him, to hold him, and know that he’s here and real and they made it out of Hell together. He reluctantly releases Sam after a long while, offering him a reassuring pat on his shoulder, and hopes that it conveys more than words can say that all of the bad blood between them before Sam jumped into the Cage was forgiven.

‘And Adam?’ Because as moving as this little reunion is, his mission isn’t complete if their youngest brother didn’t get out.

Cas holds out his hand as tendrils of pulsing energy glowing white sparks from his fingertips. His voice is solemn when he speaks, ‘Adam’s soul will return to Heaven as it should.’

Sam’s face falls for a moment, because Adam had been there with him in the Cage. They had come to rely on one another in the onslaught of rage and horror.

‘His peace is well earned,’ Cas assures them releasing the soul upwards, all three watching in wonder as glows brighter and brighter before dissipating into nothingness.

It’s a bittersweet victory in the end.

Clearing his throat in an effort to choke down the rising inevitable guilt of failure, Dean looks around, ‘... Stull.’ Good old Stull Cemetery with its weeds and wind worn crosses, battleground of the apocalypse that never happened. Dean scuffs an armoured foot against the bone dry earth. ‘I really fucking hate this place.’

-

Cas being the most presentable of the three checks them into the nearest hotel that isn’t in freaking Lawrence, Kansas upon Dean’s insistence that he’d had more than enough of his hometown and the fucked up demonic shit surrounding it. Checks them into a double just across the Missouri state line where Dean proceeds to shower and then sleep for two days straight, waking sometime late the second evening to find Cas speaking softly with Sam. He smiles sleepily, props himself up in bed and reaches for the remote control, find something to watch on low volume and leave them to whatever business they are discussing. Sam looks over at him a short while later, offers him a smile that’s infinitely grateful and more than a little sad, murmurs something he can’t make out to Cas, before moving to sit on the bed across from Dean.

‘Dean, I--’ he begins, face overly sympathetic, and oh god not that, because it’s going to make Dean feel guilty at best or uncomfortable at worst, and whatever conversation Sam’s wanting to say can definitely wait.

‘Sam, please. Don’t get all touchy feely on me right now.’

‘No, Dean. I just wanted to say, uh, thanks man.’

Dean just nods, because what can you say to that? He’s not owed anything for saving his little brother from the Cage. It’s what they do for one another, jump into the fire, all bets off.

‘You gonna be alright?’ he asks after a moment even if he knows there’s no recovering from Hell, not entirely. They will forever be a part of them, something that they will carry within themselves for the rest of their mortal lives.

‘I will be. It seems surreal, somehow, like it happened, but it’s like it was a dream.’

‘You probably have Cas to thank for that. They’ll come back.’ He remembers after his own stint in Hell, the memories had emerged gradually, as if Cas had purposely suppressed them, to ease him back into the world of the living, and not assault him with the horrors of Hell. ‘But when they do, we’ll be here for you.’

-

On the third day they make the decision to retrieve the Impala which is hopefully still parked outside Hekate’s house in New Orleans, providing that the local authorities hadn’t had it towed, or worse yet the old witch herself had seen to its removal.

Cas flies them there in less than a blink of an eye and as much as Dean hates to admit it, it sure beats driving from Missouri to Louisiana in some hot wired piece of shit with a rattling transmission.

‘Son of a bitch.’ he gripes, swiping the pink slip off the windshield. A parking ticket. They save the world from the Devil, and this is the thanks he gets.

He looks toward the immaculately manicured yard with its blooming roses and sees Hekate kneeling by the side of a rose bush, shears in hand, auburn hair swept back and her face beaming in a way it had not been before. He wants to wave, to thank her maybe for helping them, when a black haired girl in a dress the colour of saffron steps out onto the porch holding two glasses of iced tea garnished with lemon and mint.

‘Melly,’ Cas observes, because it’s her. Not as she was, but full of life. ‘Melinoe. Persephone’s daughter,’ he explains. Hekate must have cared for her as one of her own as she had once cared for her mother, guiding her between the world of the living and the dead, and had lost her to the underworld without hope of retrieving her without the risk of becoming trapped herself. ‘Dare I say that’s why she helped us.’

‘So the Goddess of the Underworld helps us free Sam so you can deliver a message to her demoness goddaughter?’ And really, that’s not too much a stretch all things considered. Stranger things have happened.

They make plans to head up north to South Dakota where Bobby’s anxiously awaiting their return, to recover and regroup, but there’s no real rush, and Dean finds a secluded spot on the coast to park his Baby, hop out and catch some evening rays. He pulls a couple of beers out of the trunk that he’d picked up a few miles down the road from a local gas station. Nothing fancy, but they deserve a celebratory drink after what they’ve been through. Pops the lids with a knife and passes a bottle to Sam, toasting each other to another job behind them, and to whatever the future might hold.

They sit in comfortable silence for a long while, Dean watching Cas’ silhouette against the setting sun as he walks along the beach in quiet reflection. Just because he’s not part of the Host any longer doesn’t mean that he doesn’t sometimes commune with them, and so Dean let’s him be, granting him the solitude when he wishes it.

‘So, you and Cas huh?’ Sam asks over his beer, and Dean’s been waiting for him to breach this topic, and dreading it at once because how do you explain how after a lifetime of chasing hot chicks, all it takes is the goddamn apocalypse and you find yourself having it real bad for some angel dick.

‘Don't get me wrong, I’m happy for you. Really. But what happened to the whole go have a normal life with Lisa?’

Dean sighs, squeezes his eyes shut for a minute because he’s really not up to having this conversation, but it had been Sam’s ‘dying wish’. ‘After Stull … things weren’t good, Sammy. I wasn’t good,’ he clarifies. ‘I couldn’t put that on Lisa, man. Couldn’t put that on Ben.’ He remembers crawling into the bottle night after night, taking on reckless hunts and proceeding to do exactly what Sam had asked him not to do. And then, then there was Cas.

‘I asked him to stay.’ Maybe it was the trauma of Hell, the trauma of losing his little brother to the same place, but Cas was the only one out there who understood what he’d been through, intimately, down to the gritty awful details and no idealized life with Lisa Braeden was going to change that, no matter how much he’d wanted it. His perfect life with a beautiful woman and her son who he would have been more than proud to call his own. He’d been nearly crazed with grief, and Cas was the only creature in the entire universe who knew how to put his mind back together when he woke in the night howling in terror for his brother. The only one crazy or stupid enough to follow him back in the fire.

Taking a pull from his beer, Dean looks off to where Cas is approaching, and smiles to himself because he might just be able to admit he’s in love with the feathery bastard, and isn’t that the damnedest thing?

_Fin_


End file.
